ABSTRACT
Academic studies, dominant cultural beliefs, and activists variously attribute clients’ patronage of sex industry venues to a host of factors, including social dysfunction, toxic masculinity, male bonding, and biology, among others. This chapter focuses on high-end venues patronized by wealthy men who strategically utilize the relationships developed there to enact entrepreneurial masculinities that foster and sustain lucrative forms of state-clientelism with powerful officials. Clientelism imposes many and varied risks for all concerned because of its reliance on extra-legal transactions, agreements, and social alliances rather than contracts that specify the terms of a given business exchange. Irrespective of the rationale offered, hostess bar patrons almost always situate their decision-making within a broader rhetoric that emphasize the restrictions of their families, dominant cultural values, and government practices that circumscribe their freedom. These clients couch their accounts of such restrictions in direct opposition to what they regard as the individualistic and entrepreneurial practices enabled and facilitated by their patronage of high-end hostess bars.
