How many UK men have paid a woman for sex?

Call girls, escorts, companions, Geisha girls, prostitution, the so-called oldest profession, represents a twilight world that exists in parallel with ‘normal society’. Every town and city in the UK has escort agencies and brothels. There are red-light areas where women entice ‘kerb crawlers’. There are more discrete avenues offering professional sex services, such as massage parlours. But the men who would use any of these outlets are people you’d never mix with. Or are they?

The fact is, for all that using prostitutes is rarely admitted to, Britain’s sex workers can rely on a steady trade of willing clients. The extent of this is far more widespread than most people would assume.

A government report produced in 2010, entitled ‘Tackling Demand for Prostitution’, revealed many poignant facts. Amongst the shocking revelations was the fact that over 10% of the adult male population have paid for sex. An equally disturbing statistic was that out of all these clients, at least 90% were either married or in steady relationships. The average prostitute was found to service 15 clients per week, or 800 a year; the majority of these were men who returned for sexual favours, usually once a week. Extrapolating these figures, the report concluded that 2.4 million men in the UK had used prostitutes at some point.

Prostitution’s once seedy image, of downtrodden women stopping cars on street corners, does not equate with the high frequency of men using their services. So what has changed in recent years?

Ever since the social liberations of the 1960s, attitudes to sexuality in the UK have been growing steadily more open. Paying for sex was once regarded as one of society’s great taboos. If news leaked that any public figure had employed the services of a prostitute, their reputation and career would be ruined. Over the past few years there have been a string of high profile cases involving Premiership footballers or A-list celebrities being caught with call girls. These disclosures scarcely merit newspaper coverage beyond a day or so.

In any town centre in the UK, men can go into bars and watch virtually naked young women cavorting around poles. For a fee, dancers will treat customers to private dances in the sanctuary of intimate booths.

But are these examples enough to explain the fact that UK men using prostitutes has doubled since the 1990s? No. What has overwhelmingly impacted figures is technology. Customers don’t have to kerb crawl any more.  They just type ‘call girl’ or ‘escorts in London’ in their search engine.