Talk:Prostitution

The article, as it stands, is very outdated. The current EU and global discussion on prostitution places the sex buyer at the heart of the debate, whereas this article starts with a lengthy discussion on the word prostitute. In my opinion (and as a man myself) I think it needs to be updated with a focus on the sex buyer, the different words for sex buyers worldwide and the current research on sex buying. Thegivingtreeismyfavorite (talk) 11:16, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

I would expect the article on prostitution to focus on prostitutes, much as the article on any other profession focuses on the people in that profession. That political discourse about regulating prostitution focuses on prostitutes' customers does not mean that the focus of an encyclopedia article on prostitution should be on the customers. The thing to look at here would be what tertiary academic sources do. Britannica seems to take a similar approach to ours. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology^TWL gets to customers in its 9th paragraph, where it is fairly critical of that framing and then returns to discussing sellers of sex. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 05:30, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

That prostitution is a profession might be your opinion but it is not supported by the 1949 UN Convention nor by the European Parliament resolution of 14 September 2023 nor by most laws in most countries. Most research and resolutions in the past 30 years consider it gender-based violence and focus on the buyer. An article should does not be oblivious of this fact. Thegivingtreeismyfavorite (talk) 11:16, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

For Wikipedia's purposes, in defining a thing, we don't care what governments, advocacy groups, or similar say: We care what scholars say. If you would like to make a case for changing how this article characterizes prostitution, you can do that on this talk page, by citing high-quality scholarly sources. If this article is out of step with the scholarly consensus, then certainly that should be changed. So far, however, you haven't presented any evidence for that being the case. Please gain consensus instead of continuing to make edits to this article that favor your personal point of view, for instance by removing the statement that prostitution is a form of sex work, or by adding the statement that it is gender-based violence (sourced only to a parliamentary resolution). Repeatedly making edits to advance a point of view and without consensus backing is disruptive. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 11:46, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

It is most definitely outdated and out of step with scholarly consensus to call sex buyers "clients" as the article now reads, and to use the highly controversial term "sex work."

See for example Farley https://prostitutionresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Comparing-Sex-Buyers-With-Men-Who-Do-Not-Buy-Sex.pdf and Rua- Vieites Vieites and Deogan

Sex buyer is the most used term in academia since more than 20 years ago - not clients. Thegivingtreeismyfavorite (talk) 11:54, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

Well let's see. 2,770 GScholar-indexed works since 2005 use "sex buyer" or "sex buyers". "Client" is a bit harder to track, since it has far more meanings, but we can see 81,500 indexed works containing either "client" or "clients" alongside either "prostitute" or "prostitution". If that seems too broad since the words could be far apart in the document, we can throw together some common phrases containing "client" in the context of prostitution, and we still get 3,740. That's all still post-2005. Of course, not all sources are created equal. We look toward tertiary sources and highly-cited secondary sources for things like word choice. Britannica uses "client". Blackwell uses "client" in the general context and "buyer" when talking about radical feminist perspectives. I remain open to being convinced that "buyer" is the more common term, but I don't think citing three people using it proves the point; clearly many people use it, but the question is whether most do. It's important to keep in mind that feminist discourse on prostitution is not the only scholarly discussion of prostitution. It's also discussed as an economic subject, a public health one, a sociological one, a queer-studies one, etc. All of these fields' approaches matter. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 12:10, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

I also don't see, in looking through sources, anything to indicate that "sex work" is a "highly controversial term". There are certainly some anti-prostitution activists who view it as legitimizing the practice—and this is the kind of terminology debate that inevitably happens with anything of varying societal acceptance—but overall it's widely used across disciplines when discussing prostitution, including in the first and third of the three sources you cited above. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 12:17, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

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"The majority ofsex buyers are male and the majority of prostitutes are women.[7][8]" need a space between "of" and "sex". ~2025-33839-45 (talk) 13:15, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

 Done – Thanks! Favonian (talk) 13:22, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2025 and 18 December 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ponderingplant (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Ponderingplant (talk) 15:02, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

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