Commercial sex and condom use among involuntary male ... - Ined

16DISCUSSIONS AND CONCLUSIONSMarriage Squeeze and the Prevalence of Commercial SexThe above analyses indicate that unmarried men report a prevalence of commercialsex experience which is significantly higher than that of the married, both at their firstand last sexual intercourse (with percentages of 10.4% and 1.4%, 13.3% and 1.9%respectively). Overall, our results are rather consistent with those from other existingresearch conducted in China (ranging from 4-10%) (W.D., Cai et al., 2006; Wang &Li et al., 2007; B. Li et al., 2008; B. Wen et al., 2012). They are not completelycomparable however, as the men surveyed here do not belong to strictly similarsocio-economic groups (most of the available studies for China focus on urbanmigrants, while the present survey targeted only rural men). It is noteworthy howeverthat variations in the likelihood to resort to commercial sex across different groupshave been evidenced by other existing studies focusing on other countries in the world(Parrado & Flippen, et al., 2004; Carael & Slaymaker, et al., 2006; Garenne, 2008), assuggested above in the literature review.The results from our regression analysis indicate that marital status is almost theonly significant variable for predicting the experience of commercial sex both at thefirst and last sexual intercourse (actually, the explanatory power of the models isgreatly improved when marital status is included, as shown above). This means that ina context of male marriage squeeze, which is translating into a reduced availability offemale sexual partners within marriage, commercial sex is suggested to be one of theimportant ways for the involuntary bachelors to meet their sexual needs (Attané et al.