Product Description
Following up on his scathing indictment of the international sexual enslavement of women in The Natashas, investigative journalist Victor Malarek lays bare the other side of the crisis—the men who fuel the demand.
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Product Description
Following up on his scathing indictment of the international sexual enslavement of women in The Natashas, investigative journalist Victor Malarek lays bare the other side of the crisis—the men who fuel the demand.
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Malarek had a bias against Johns before he started this book, considering them to be the worst dredges of society. A shame, because this book could have been a fascinating insight into the psychie of men paying for prostitution. But in the end, Malarek uses this as a vehicle to simply throw out unsubstantiated statistics and rhetoric against men in general. His assertion that there are 20M prostitutes in the world and each prostitute servicing 30 different men each night means that 1 in 9 men use the services of prostitutes is ridiculous, and fear monguering at its worst. As a man, I find these unfounded insinuations entirely insulting. His source for most of his research? Messages postings on the Internet. This is sloppy journalism, and I expected better from someone with the credentials of Malarek. The numbers don’t make any sense, and ignore the possibility that the same men could be going to a set of different prostitites within their area, eventually returning to the same prostitute. Even with Malarek’s 20M and 30 different Johns numbers that ends up more along the lines of .06% of the male population. Malrek blames men entirely for prostitution, placing no blame on the prostitutes themselves stating that without men there would be no demand, and without demand there would be no supply. Further he calls for huge changes in the laws prosecuting johns with no reprocutions to prostitutes themselves; with no apparent discinction between human trafficking, holding people against their wills, and voluntary prostitution.
Rating: 1 / 5
The Johns by Victor Malarek is an overview of the men who purchase sex from prostitutes. I’m not sure, as advertised, that “little” has been written about such men. If I enter “customers prostitution” in Amazon Books I get over three hundred responses. Not having read those books I can not venture to say whether this book is in any way better or more complete. However, having read The Johns, I can say that I found it to be a moderately interesting overview of the subject.
The first 60% or so of the book is built around a series of chapters about the men who buy sex. The chapters basically “escalate” from the meek men who are socially maladjusted, the family men who aren’t getting any at home, those who’ve had divorces or failed relationships, the third world sex tourists through the hardcore women haters looking to degrade women. Most of chapters are illustrated by the quotes that the author has taken from the thousands of on-line comments he reviewed. Personally I would suspect that men who log on the internet to boast about their sexual activities might not be a totally average selection of Johns. While I don’t doubt the quotes Victor Malarek cites they seem far more colorful than the predominantly banal discussions I saw on some of the websites the author mentions. I didn’t think that there was anything particularly new or insightful in these chapters, compared with say a feature article on sex tourism in Thailand in the Sunday newspaper, but I did feel that it was a comprehensive summation.
The balance of the book is more editorial and based on the author’s perception of what should be done. Some aspects of these chapters are interesting: the presence of trafficking in prostitutes (the author wrote a compelling book on the subject, The Natashas), the effectiveness of “John” school and the impact of outlawing the buying (as opposed to the selling) of sex in Sweden. However the author’s opinions tend to predominate rather than any exhaustive analysis. His very justified disgust at human trafficking also means that he will not tolerate any consideration whatsoever that a woman might voluntarily choose to become a sex worker. Similarly he admires the Swedish experiment but fails to followup his own assertion that prostitution was expanding rapidly in the adjacent countries (i.e. did the Swedes reduce prostitution or simply create sex tourists).
Victor Malarek is an investigative journalist on Canadian public television. As such he specializes in 8 to 12 minute segments where there is the innocent victim, the dastardly villain and the self righteous condemnation at the end. In many ways the strengths and weaknesses of this book mirror those segments. It shows the plight of the innocent prostitute who must sell her body, it condemns the dastardly males who purchase sex and it demands the criminalization of Johns to resolve the matter. However those mini-Victorian morality plays leave no room for complexity, doubt or discussion. Unfortunately the same is true of this book.
Rating: 4 / 5
A wake-up call for men who think of nothing but themselves when exploiting women and girls.
Prostitution is not a victimless crime.
Rating: 5 / 5
That the men who buy sex from trafficked girls are not moral pillars of the community is a shock to absolutely no one. The surprise coming from Malarek’s The Johns Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy it is how brazen and unapologetic these men are for their actions. Some are even so diluted in their thought process that they actually believe that they are performing some sort of charitable action by giving a poor girl a miniscule amount of money that will go back to help feed her impoverished family in some third world country, therefore making the men heroes instead of disgusting pigs. Some reviewers have described this book as “man bashing.” With all due respect, the men depicted within these pages are the prototypical man who would buy sex–a man who has hidden anger towards women or has been somehow conditioned to believe that women and children are a property to be owned.
I was able to read this book in one day because it read very quickly painting a picture of this angry, insecure, man-creature, discontented with his own life who needs to buy the sex of a stranger to compensate for the failings of himself…or more often in the eyes of the Johns the failings of Western women. I wish that Malarek had balanced his study of the men with more stories of the young women he’s met in prostitution and human trafficking, that way maybe it would not have seemed like he was gaining up on the men involved in the global sex trade. Malarek is correct however in pinpointing the men in the link of the global sex trade because without men willing to pay for the sex, the trafficking and exploitation of women would not be so profitable. In any business whether it be legal or illegal the key is profitability, there’s a reason why pimps, brothel owners, and gangsters traffic women because there are men willing to pay for sex making it immensely profitable.
Rating: 5 / 5
The subject matter of this book is quite disturbing but the author has done an excellent job of stepping inside the world of Johns and researching their thought processes and actions – in their own words in many cases. He even traveled to several sites around the world seen as sexual vacation locations by Johns and promoted on the worldwide tourims venues as sex tourism locations. Anyone with a conscience and awareness of human trafficking for the sex trade and those who are sheltered from this topic should give this book a read. This book tells the ugly truth about men who pay for sex.
Rating: 5 / 5