The focus of today’s episode is sex work: Not primarily on sexworkers, but on what sort of men use the services of sex workers and why. I am preparing this podcast at a time when a motion picture about a sex worker – or should I say more accurately a stripper who has sexual relations with men formoney – has just won five Oscars. It is not for me to comment on whether the situation portrayed in that film was typical or atypical of the relationship between a sex worker and herclient. It strikes me that the “client” in the case of this movie was probably not a typical client of a sex worker, but I will let that pass and move on to academic and scholarly research on the subject.
In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published his book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” Kinsey and his associates reported that atthat time 69 per cent of the total white male population of the United States visited a prostitute at some time, and from 15 to 20 per cent visited prostitutes more than a few times a year. They also reported that single men visited prostitutes from three to four times as often as married men, and that thelower socio-economic groups were most likely, while college educated men are least likely, to visit prostitutes. To fast forward to 2015, a report entitled “Who Buys Sex” by the organization Demand Abolition estimated the annual size of the US commercial sex market at $5.7 billion.
As its CEO Randolph Pitts turned a small, new film production company, Lumière Films, Inc., into the most successful independent producer/financier in Hollywood, best known for the multi-award winning film "Leaving Las Vegas", for which Nicolas Cage won the Oscar as Best Actor. Today he is a widely respected international motion picture producer and production company executive. He holds Summa Cum Laude degrees in Social Psychology and Egyptology from the University of California Berkeley, and a Masters Degree in Motion Picture Production and Entertainment Law from UCLA. He has also done advanced research for the Department of Psychology at UCLA, concentrating on couples and relationships dynamics. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association, the organization of university professors of philosophy. He is also an associate member of the Los Angeles County Bar Association. He has a lifelong interest in the relationshipbetween philosophy, psychology and history. He is the founder, writer and host of the Explore Ecstatic Sensuality podcast, the number one sex and sensuality podcast in the world. The first volume of his eagerly anticipated tetralogy ofnovels will be published during the second quarter of 2025. Pitts' spellbinding novels deal at an unrelenting fever pitch with eroticism, mysticism, terrorism and crime on a global scale. And also… with women and men falling in love.Advance praise for one of Randolph Pitts' novels: "A sexy thriller that shows New York City in the grip of terrorists, natural disasters and voodoo magic, while at the same time being a moving meditation on love, sensuality, and twenty-first century man's fate in the universe. Possibly the greatestnovel of our time. I am going to nominate it for the Pulitzer Prize."
