Why a Stud Ranch For Women Won't Work

Heidi Fleiss has announced that she plans to found a brothel in one of the counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal. She says this will be special brothel: one staffed by males for female clients. According to an article published by CNN.com, Fleiss has said, "I am opening up a stud farm. I am going to have the sexiest men on earth. Women are going to love it."

I believe this venture and others like it are doomed to failure, American Gigolo fantasies to the contrary.

The one constant of the sex industry is the gender of those making up that market. Women or men may be prostitutes but men are customers. Attempts to find a sizeable female market for the services of sex workers are likely to collide with the laws of supply and demand.

Fleiss correctly notes, "Women make more money these days, they're calling the shots, they're more powerful." However, in a world in which women hold high offices, manage businesses, and perform surgery, and in which men change diapers, do laundry, and work the switchboard, the sex industry remains resistant to change. As Richard A. Posner notes in Sex and Reason, "Even in societies in which women are prosperous and independent (modern Scandinavia, for example), and therefore could easily afford to patronize prostitutes, there is no demand for prostitutes of either sex to service women." Why?

Here we come to the most basic, biologically based differences between the genders. However, to understand these core differences, we must first say what those differences are not to avoid falling into Victorian-style "men are such beasts," women are loving angels stereotypes.

Women are not naturally monogamous. The increasing rate of infidelity amongst wives, catching up to and in some age groups surpassing that of husbands, demonstrates that women enjoy sexual variety. Studies showing a surprisingly high rate of babies born in wedlock are not fathered by husbands also support this point.

Contrary to sexist myth, women can separate sexual enjoyment from emotional involvement. After all, masturbation is the easiest way for either sex to reach orgasm and especially so for women. Moreover, items such as dildos, vibrators, and ben-wa balls are sold to females. Clearly, women can and do enjoy mechanical sex -- indeed they even pay for it -- with machines.

But women do not, in appreciable numbers, pay for sex with people. To explain this persistent fact, we come to two of the deepest differences between men and women.

For women, there is a biologically based cost to introducing another person's body into one's sexual pleasure: pregnancy. Furthermore, the cost of partnered sex may be built into the female brain, causing that well-known psychic letdown women experience when sex is followed by nothing. As evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright says (The New Republic, 11/28/94), "When a woman has sex under a man's pretenses of affection (Darwinian translation: pretenses of commitment to ensuing offspring) and then he never calls again, the evolutionary source of her anguish is the same as for the anguish following rape: she has had sex with a man she (unconsciously) deemed unworthy of her eggs, even though in this case the deeming was done after the fact, once evidence of his unworthiness surfaced."

None of this means that women will not engage in causal, partnered sex or even seek it out. It just means they will not pay for it because there is a "payment" built into the act itself.

A second factor that ensures women will never, in large numbers, patronize sex professionals is that female sexuality is heavily tied to feeling attractive. While men also like their partners to view them as attractive, their enjoyment does not depend on being so flattered. Fleiss believes she has a potential market from "the situation with the old husband leaving his wife for the younger girl and the lady sitting at home crying. Well, now she has a place to go and say, 'Right back at you, buddy, and on your credit card." The problem is that the woman is crying partly because the man's desertion makes her feel unlovely and she cannot feel irresistible if she pays.

Finally, the fact that women get pregnant could make work at a "stud farm" peculiarly high risk. Female customers could sue hustlers for child support. A man-for-hire could end up earning much less from his work than he pays out because of its consequences.

*

This column builds on points made by a previous one that was published in Intercourse.