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TABLE 5.6
The Implicit Prices of Ethnicity and Sexual Behavior Interactions in the Male Escort Market on Site X
 
 
Note:
Robust standard errors in parentheses. Each column is a separate regression where the log of the price is the dependent variable. Each entry is the coefficient of the interaction of the row and column. For example, the “Black Top” coefficient is the coefficient of the black*top interaction term in the regression. All regressions include controls for ethnicity, city, sexual behaviors, other personal characteristics, and an intercept.
*
p
< .05; **
p
< .01 (two-tailed tests).
 
Limitations and Future Research
 
While this study makes use of novel data to test theories of male sex work, several limitations to the present analysis should be noted. First, I analyzed only the largest website for escort advertisements in the U.S., and the results might not hold for competitors’ sites. For example, if certain types of escorts are more likely to congregate at different websites, they would not be captured in my data, limiting my ability to describe the market in general. Second, information in the advertisements is posted by the escorts and therefore constitutes a self-report. While I exploited independent data to confirm the precision of the price measure, I cannot say with certainty that there are no omitted confounders in the data. Third, the dataset may be missing variables that could influence the price of escort services, such as endowment, an escort’s education level, or expertise in specific sexual conduct.
These limitations should inform future research. For example, future studies should analyze competing websites with a similar methodology to confirm or challenge results presented here. Similarly, detailed analysis of client-operated websites, which review escort services, could act as an independent check on the veracity of the information posted in escort advertisements. Future research should develop panel data on male escorts that would allow one to track escorts over time to see how and if their behaviors, identities, advertisements, and personas change, which would add an important dimension to this literature.
Discussion and Conclusions
 
This chapter has addressed important questions pertaining to male sex work. These questions relate to basic facts about male escorts, their geographic distribution, and the relationship between escort characteristics, sexual behaviors, and prices. Using a unique quantitative data source of male sex workers, the study uncovered a number of facts that should stimulate further research into male sex work and related areas of gender, sexuality, masculinity, ethnicity, and crime. In general, the results suggest that male sex work is markedly different from its female counterpart. It also shows how concepts from ethnographic, qualitative, and theoretical work in social science can be subjected to quantitative empirical approaches, including statistical tests of hypotheses.
The data show that escorts are present in cities with low and high gay concentrations; this result supports work that suggests a significant portion of the male escort clientele is not gay-identified. Personal characteristics, except for those pertaining to body build, are largely not related to male escorts’ prices. Muscular men enjoy a premium in the market, while overweight and thin men face a penalty, which is consistent with hegemonic masculinity and the literature on the body and sexuality. Conformity to hegemonic masculine physical norms is well rewarded in the market.
The premium to being a top is substantial, as is the penalty for being a bottom, again consistent with the theory of hegemonic masculinity. When intersecting these behaviors with ethnicity, it was found that black men are at the extremes—they have the largest premiums for top behavior and the largest penalties for bottom behavior. This is consistent with intersectionality theory in that gay communities prize black men who conform to racialized stereotypes of sexual behavior and penalize those who do not. While the sexually dominant black male is feared in heterosexual communities, he is rewarded handsomely in gay communities.
Given the quantitative results, the ways in which desire intersects with ethnic stereotypes should receive significant attention in future masculinity studies. Theoretically, these results should renew attention on the complex construction of masculinities among gay men, in which counter-hegemonic groups adopt and reiterate hegemonic masculine norms among themselves, explicitly reinforcing hegemonic norms. In particular, further work at the nexus of the construction of masculinity among gay men, hegemonic masculinity, and ethnic inequality would be a fruitful area of research.
Further research on ethnicity, sexuality, and commerce is needed to address issues unexplored here. For instance, due to data limitations, class dimensions inherent in male sex work have remained unexplored. An important question for intersectionality theory in light of the results presented here is how ethnicity and sexual behavior intersect with class masculinities to yield premiums and penalties in this market. Furthermore, causal estimates of male escort behavior on prices, which would be key for policy discussions such as the feasibility of sexual behavior change among male sex workers to minimize disease risk (Connell, 2002) also have not been explored. Implications for men involved in this market—socially, sexually, and health-wise—should certainly be investigated further at greater depth.
Research on male sex work needs to move at an accelerated pace. As the discussion in this chapter shows, there is much to be gained from an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Future developments along this line would enhance and extend our understanding of sexuality and gender in general and male sex work in particular, shedding light on important issues in social research and public policy.
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