Demand

This article traces how social reformers, state actors, physicians, feminists, and people who sell sex have described the demand for prostitution, a term that has provided ideological support for policy approaches both supporting and opposing commercial sex over the last two centuries. In Europe, the United States, and more globally, critics have employed demand in an ostensibly neutral sense to suggest that sex functions like a commodity. For some it is the inevitable result of an inherent male sexual drive, while for others it is the mutable product of social, economic, and cultural forces. The article shows how the market abstraction of “supply and demand” obscures the complex web of causal factors that shape the sex industry in particular contexts. It begins with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the regulation of prostitution, along with calls for its abolition, and then turns to transnational discussions of prostitution demand in multistate organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations. The article closes with an analysis of postwar feminists debates on the purported links between demand and violence against women, and the recent ascendance of the “End Demand” model, which criminalizes the sex buyer.