The men cross their arms, slouch, and spread their feet wideβand you've never felt anything quite like the overwhelming awkwardness, the tangible defensiveness, that surrounds them. All eight have been busted for trying to buy sex. They've paid fines or spent time in jail or, in some cases, been forced to register as sex offenders. And now they're here, in this beige classroom, for the final, and most unusual, part of the punishment meted out by King County, Washington. For the next couple of months, they'll be required to think deeply about what led them to the parking lots and motels where they were arrested.
They'll be asked to plumb their emotions and to contemplate their place in the patriarchy. It's a modest experiment with a rather immodest goal: to solve the sex trade by changing the lives of the men who perpetrate it.
I wanted to see what on earth this might look like in practice. An eight-week court-ordered course meant to teach so-called johns about empathy and healthy relationships, about gender socialization and victim-blaming and toxic masculinity? When I asked for a closer look, the men in a recent course were invited to vote on whether they'd be okay with a female reporter quietly observing it all from the back of the room.
Remarkably, they said yes. And so, on a Thursday evening, I shook hands with the men, one by one, as they trickled in, took their seats, and slumped in silence. The usual small talk was clearly moot here. What would they say?
Each man already knew at least the outline of how the others had ended up in that room, because it was the same way he had ended up there. For Akio, who's 40 but has a shyness that makes him seem much younger, it was a first-time lark. Steve, 60, divorced, fresh from stalking allegations and more than one restraining order, had responded to a daddy-daughter deal on a fetish site. She told him to meet her in the parking lot between a bank and a McDonald's.
