Clients, Customers, Johns, and Tricks

John.  Trick.  Customer.  Client.

All common names for the patrons of prostitutes.  John and trick of course are slang terms used on the street for those people.  Everyone has heard these references on just about every television show with a law enforcement theme.  The play cops have to refer to the clients as “johns” to maintain their pseudo street-cred to sound cool and in-the-know to those who watch their exploits on TV.

The term john is believed to have originated from the customer practice of giving their name as ‘John’, a common name in English-speaking countries, in an effort to maintain anonymity. The word trick comes from customer’s practices of trying to trick the women into doing more than the customer pays for.

What about the sex workers; what do they call their customers?  I know when I interviewed the streetwalkers for my honors project in undergrad, almost all of them referred to the guys as tricks, with some occasionally referring to them as johns.  The women who work in the brothels generally referred to their clients as customers, and the escorts I’ve talked to alternated between customer and client.  As I mentioned here in reference to the CNBC story on high-end prostitution, I prefer using the term client.

So what’s the difference, you ask?

According to American Heritage Dictionary, both customer and client can be defined as “a person who purchases goods or services from another.” However, they only list that one definition for customer; they provide five other definitions for client.  Among these, client is also defined as “the party for which professional services are rendered, as by an attorney.”

The main difference between a customer and a client, then, is that a protective, ongoing business relationship is formed with a client, but not necessarily with a customer.  Basically, a customer is a one-off transaction and a client is someone with whom you try to establish a partnership or similar relationship with.  This makes sense when you frame it within the context of the type of relationship a brothel prostitute has (generally a one time deal, though that’s not always the case), vs. the type of longer-term relationship I seek to build with the people I see.

If you will recall from my earlier posts, my goal was to develop a recurring base of clients, and that is largely what I have done.  I have had a couple of appointments that I would suggest fall into the category of “customer,” but since I am providing a professional service to these people, the term client is a much more appropriate nomenclature in light of the accepted definition of the words as outlined above.

Besides, I think client just sounds, well, more professional.  Don’t you? 

1. Providers and Clients with STIs I was talking with a woman who’s interested in becoming...
2. Interaction If you’re not familiar with it, there’s a web site...

Tagged as: clients, prostitute