The men cross their arms, slouch, and spread their feet wide—and 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. He made a point of calling it “hanging out” when he asked how much he and a friend would be charged for an hour with a woman at a Ramada Inn.

Steve, 60, divorced, fresh from stalking allegations and more than one restraining order, had responded to a daddy-daughter deal on a fetish site.

Jason, a 22-year-old Mormon just back from a two-year mission—during which spending time with the opposite sex was strictly off-limits—arranged for a $70 blow job from a girl (she made a point of telling him she was a minor, though he swears he didn't go looking for that). She told him to meet her in the parking lot between a bank and a McDonald's.

Laughing, he offered another way to put it: “We're trying to teach them how to love.” Then he stopped laughing and said, “For real.”

David, 51 and fairly new to the computer, was on Craigslist looking for deals on auto parts when he noticed there were other ads there, too, ads for young women. Back in his military days, he'd bought sex on the street pretty regularly—“I treat 'em just like a human,” he told me later. He clicked on one of the ads and got an answer back from someone who gave her name as Jen. “What if I'm under 18?” she asked him. David went to meet her at a 7-Eleven, but when he got there, there was no Jen. There never had been. There was only the police waiting for him.

Man after man, the details differed but the denouement was the same: They went to a parking lot or to a motel or to some other rendezvous expecting sex, and got something else. The blood drains, the stomach drops, and instead of the woman he arranged to meet, there's a police detective standing in the doorway or stepping out of the car. Some of what followed was predictable: the trips to court, the heavy fees, to say nothing of the shame that must be borne before wives, bosses, pastors.

But ending up here in this classroom was far less expected. The idea for the course came from Peter Qualliotine, a co-founder of the Seattle-based Organization for Prostitution Survivors, who had worked for years with women caught up in the sex trade. But long ago, Peter became convinced that his best chance for combating the harms of the sex trade depended on working with the men—with those trying to pay for sex.

In plenty of cities and counties around the country, men busted for buying sex get sent to a class known as “john school”—usually just a scared-straight afternoon with lectures about STDs and jail time and the harms of prostitution. It's the sex-work version of traffic school; in some places, the whole thing consists of a 15-minute video. Peter had taught those classes and didn't think much of their effectiveness. He had something grander in mind.

“My pitch for the men is: Patriarchy hurts you, too,” Peter told me when I first contacted him about the singular experiment he's launched in King County. “You deserve a healthy relationship that makes you happy.” Laughing, he offered another way to put it: “We're trying to teach them how to love.” Then he stopped laughing and said, “For real.”

On the first day of class, Peter stood at the whiteboard and wrote the phrase “Act Like a Man.” He then asked the class to give him examples of what the phrase meant to them, writing down the answers they called out: strong, tough, good at sports, lots of sex, fighting, devoid of emotion, disciplined.

Then he drew a box around the list and suggested that these notions created a rather impossible standard for guys, a standard that excludes important things like empathy and vulnerability and gets in the way of deep relationships. He asked them to think about what it would take, in their own lives, to fit within the box he'd drawn, what names they'd get called if they strayed outside it. The men offered up “sissy” and “queer” and other words that questioned their sexuality.

Steve, the man who'd responded to the daddy-daughter ad, told me later that he regarded the activity as just an icebreaker—kind of a fun get-to-know-you exercise. He was sure it didn't have anything to do with the point of the class or the notion of sexual exploitation or why he might have done the things that landed him there. Instead, when I met him outside of class to chat (he'd suggested we get together at a Starbucks right next to the county line, which he said he wasn't allowed to cross without permission), he tried to explain away, in an almost unstoppable monologue, the restraining order, the domestic violence arrest, the tracking device he put on his ex-girlfriend's truck, the stalking allegations that got him effectively banned from a hospital and an entire small city, and especially his conviction for trying to buy sex from a person he was told was a 15-year-old girl.