Buying Sex

In this article, I attempt to deepen feminists’ understanding of the power dynamics in the practice of client-prostitute relations by exploring how clients (in Mandarin, Piao-ke) make sense of their relationships with prostitutes. On the basis of tens of online and in-person interviews with Taiwanese Piao-ke, I explore the diverse and subtle details that surface in the clients’ narratives and that might otherwise have been neglected. Instead of totalizing Piao-ke as problematic, I suggest a postmodernist feminist understanding of the practice, namely, one founded on a distinction between acceptable from dominant practices and discourses that should be targeted.