Harrington Park Press

Male Sex Work in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland
Paul J. Maginn
Graham Ellison
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17312/harringtonparkpress/2014.09.msws.017

In Ireland, as in most Western liberal democracies, the regulatory gaze on sex work is biased in that political, policy, and moral concerns tend to focus on the experiences of female sex workers. Very little is known about the male sex worker population, especially in a heteronormative culture like Ireland’s—North and South—where the church, Catholic and Protestant, has played a fundamental role in shaping societal and political attitudes toward sex and sexuality. This chapter breaks new ground with its empirical analysis of male sex work in Ireland, which draws from anonymized profile data of both male and female sex workers who operate across Ireland. Data obtained from one of Ireland’s largest webbased escort sites provide insight into the scale and composition of male sex workers in terms of the age, nationality, sexual orientation, and sexual preferences of approximately 500 male sex workers and almost 5,000 female sex workers. These data reveal that the geography of male sex workers is by no means an urban phenomenon: a significant proportion of male sex workers provide services to people in rural Ireland. The male sex worker population is contrasted with the female sex worker population, also using anonymized data from the same escort agency, in order to examine the similarities and differences between the two broad segments of the sex worker market. In terms of the regulation of sex work in Ireland, male sex work is rendered virtually invisible within political and policy discourses. This is reflected in recent government reviews and political debate about sex work in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where the criminalization of sex work and the purchase of sex services are favored.