Might vary a bit locally (~within Europe), but the gap between those numbers is way too large. StackOverflow survey puts a factor 2 (or 1.8 or something) between EU and US, not a factor 6.
300k+ is, from what I gather, very high for US, whereas 50k is more or less entry level in western EU. But take my impression as a data point (or a cluster), not the ultimate source of truth.
Almost none of the digital issues seem to be around transacting of cash. That part seems solved (via Cashapp or BTC). All pain points stem around one party wanting to hide their identity. While simultaneously verifying their clients' identify in great detail, down to a psych profile! An interesting non-zero sum game ;)
The OP did mention using crypto currency, although implied that it was an unusual thing for sure (in general, and not usual for them either).
> I required deposits of 20% for long appointments (6+ hours), because I had a lot of time booked up that would be a painful loss if they cancelled. Deposits are hard to do because everybody wants anonymity and payment processers are cruel; I typically accepted amazon gift cards or crypto.
Yeah, I am amazed johns are ok with it. Not only paying multiple hundreds of dollars but also disclosing your identity and personal information to someone who won't? I can imagine myself taking many strange deals but this one just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
A guy who wants a relationship may only have sex with a handful of women. While a guy who just wants sex can get into the hundreds. That's hundreds of experiences reinforcing that men only want sex compared to just a few saying the opposite. Samppling bias you could say.
It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it and start the work of reducing the stigma. Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history. I do not understand why people fight this battle.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.
Assassination.
Burglary.
Similar to abortion, people are going to do it whether or not it's legal. It will never have an "end". It's one of the oldest professions in human history.
Some might argue that assassination and burglary have a victim where prostitution does not.
There are arguments against prostitution as a victimless crime, but it is not straightforward in any argument to demonstrate victim and perpetrator like it is with assassination, burglary, assault, etc.
You're seriously out here comparing consensual sex between two consenting adults to murder for hire? You can at least try to make a point in good faith first.
I never voiced my attitude towards legalization of prostitution. I addressed very specific weak argument.
Sorry, if you found my comment rude, i assure you that this was not my goal.
You used abortion there. I don't think we could get a consent from fetus, law just assumes that female parent have a power over it's life until some development point.
People consensually participate at gambling, dueling, pyramid schemes, become criplled drugs and alcohol addicts, selling themselves and they family to slavery, do suicide.
Nor consent, nor something being an old and persistent part of the human culture are good reasoning.
I said sex work is an old profession to exemplify why banning it doesn't work. I certainly didn't present the age of the profession as the sole reason for legalizing it.
I don't think you consider assassination and prostitution equivilant crimes, yet you made the comparison. Why? What's the point of taking something out of context to invalidate it?
If you have reasons for opposing the legalization of sex work, they're completely lost on me. Maybe start there instead of pedantry.
> It would be nice if we could just regulate this industry to protect the people in it.
Amen to that. As an ignorant outsider looking in, the first thing that comes to mind is the possible huge safety benefits gained by collective bargaining. Even if it's not certified and recognized by the NLRB, there's gotta be something.
Decriminalization, that's mostly what sex workers want. I'm pretty wary of regulation, which often is done in misguided ways by people out of touch with sex workers' actual needs.
How do you feel about the approach being taken in Victoria, Australia?
It's been legal in licensed settings for quite a while, but they're now changing to make it legal in more situations in response to requests from solo sex workers. I'm rather happy with the situation (and new improvements) as a client and my understanding is that workers are happy about it.
Decriminalization is implied. Necessary but not sufficient. That most certainly should (have) happen(ed by now). By regulation, I'm thinking the worker safety axis, not nec. the consumer protection one; agreed, if existent, it should be steered by those with understanding of actual needs, and not the peanut gallery.
Legalizing for protection of those involved is one thing, but it is completely orthogonal to 'reducing the stigma'. Frankly this is where these movements lose people, including the abortion movement.
Youre downvoted but have a good point. I agree its a victimless crime and so the govt has no business regulating it, but pushing for destigmitization is a different kind of social change. Why is that important?
I know a lot of guys who dont wake up every day and say they want to sell their bodys for hard labor to the highest bidder, but it's decent work. Similar to how women can contract incurable, potentially-lethal venereal diseases as prostitutes, jobs like construction can really mess up a man's body. Doesn't mean we should ban them.
Yet, many men wake up with the desire to build things. That is not an atypical desire. Many men wake up with a desire to build things for money. Many women do as well.
Few people wake up wanting to sell their procreative parts to the highest bidder.
If you're okay with one of these things but not the other, then you are applying a double standard based on a moralisation of sex. Sex as labour is no different than any labour, and there is no criticism of sex work that is whole an complete that does not also criticise the very system you're defending.
If that is true, then a thought experiment would be: should refusing to enter prostitution be a grounds for losing jobseekers' welfare, eg. jobseekers allowance [1]?
It's comparable to working in a butcher that specialises in pork. Clearly, the job would be unsuitable for a Muslim or vegan jobseeker. That's why the government website specifies suitable jobs and has an exception for a good reason not to do the job.
I agree with the general principle that not all labour is the same, but I don't think prostitution is in a class of its own. If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
> If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
Maybe this means that you don't really like your job? If you had access to the same goods as everyone else around you, more or less, and liked what you are doing, then doing it for a week stops making sense, doesn't it?
For me it would've been ok to work 6/5(better 6/4) for the rest of my life if it actually was something meaningful for the society, and if I had an opportunity to occasionally switch to smth different, and if i got a stable life for it. Even if i didn't like the job with all my heart
Sex is very different. Last I checked, no matter how much construction work you do, you will never construct another person, even by accident.
Sex is not just another activity. Due to its effects of potentially creating a new human being, it is a category unto itself and deserves special treatment.
For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb?
The same is true of selling sex, which is not just some social interaction, but a social interaction that can literally make a new person
Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
> For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb? [...] Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
Speaking of lazy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison. Depriving yourself of a vital organ is not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
"Making a new person" is also a complete red herring. You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term, which is also paying to use someone else's genitals to actually make a new person. The only meaningful difference is the absence of "sex", so I think it's clear what you really have a problem with.
> You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term
In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described. Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
> not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
Given the genitals ability to produce life that can last many years beyond yourself, you're absolutely right. Renting out your genitals is much worse.
> In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described.
No it's not. The potential to make humans is not equal to the intentional act to create humans, just like the potential to commit murder is not the same as the intentional act to commit murder.
> Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
You definitely need to update your list, because more states are surrogate friendly than aren't.
Because the action under consideration is of a wholly different class than the others you mention.
For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life.
The same is true of prostitution. The action undertaken is of a wholly different nature. Namely it can create people, which is different than any other labor.
Tolerating homosexual prostitution is actually more akin to your other analogies in that the action undertaken is not special. Although anal intercourse in general ought to be discouraged due to its deleterious health effects.
> For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life. The same is true of prostitution.
No, we don't regulate it because it can create new life, we regulate it because it falls under healthcare for which doctors have a certain duty of care, and if IVF is done poorly it can cause all sorts of deleterious health effects for the mother and the implanted embryo. These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Nonsense, we directly regulate even that which is not about health care. For example, most countries limit the amount of children a man can sire via sperm donation.
> These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Whose burden falls solely on the women, and for which large portions of the population would object to the use of abortion as birth control. Even many pro-abortion people object to abortion's use as birth control, because they view abortion as justified murder, but murder nevertheless.
No, abortion is not murder because fetuses do not have personhood under the law. It's clear you don't really understand the legal precedents you're pontificating on so I don't really see this going anywhere.
Many jobs are somewhat like that, but it's a matter of degree. Compare the market price of the job to the price that would lead people to want to take the job.
A lot of people would be willing to become a janitor at 3 times the market wages for janitors. A lot of people who are physically able to do construction work would take the job at 3 times the market rate for construction work. Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
This means that prostitution is much farther on the scale of "forced into by circumstances" than janitors or construction workers.
>Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that prostitution is immune to the same price based supply and demand forces that every other labor pool is.
The problem is that people who become prostitutes are often people who have no other choice. So you'll get a bifurcated distribution: people who will only take the job at some incredibly high multiple (because prostitution is really awful compared to other choices) and people who will take the job at any price because the janitors aren't hiring and they need to eat. The point of the comparison is to capture this problem.
True. Ultimately, the problem which requires a solution is not decriminalization of the prostitution but the origin of why people get into the situation where prostitution starts looking as a way out. But, since no one cares, decriminalization is a good thing to do - excluding people from the society for getting into the situation, which is a product of this society, is unfair
I'd say it's because your primary base of support is going to come from people who are tired of the thing being stigmatized. Of course they're going to want to fight against that - it's only natural.
It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime. It's hard to talk about an experience that will get you branded a criminal...
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
Drug gangs destroying South America, tens of thousands dying due to Fentanyl-laced pills, lost tax revenue, huge taxpayer expense, petty crime used to fund overpriced drugs, are all signficiantly worse things than what you are afraid of. It's a laugh to see all these right-leaning people who pretend to be libertarians (not sure if that's you, but in general) but are actually in favor of a large state and authoritarian government intervention on topics such as drugs.
I'm not a libertarian and I'm not a small government person.
I believe inimited government, not small government.
If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.
For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.
Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.
Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.
> Ok, you are not a hypocrite, but I still think it's objectively bad policy from a cost-benefit standpoint, and it's bad from every political perspective. Four arguments that might move a right-leaning person:
I'm not a libertarian, but libertarians -- unless they're of the high school variety -- are not carte blanche small government. They are certainly limited government. Perhaps you should begin by not arguing against high-school-level strawmen.
> The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
Almost certainly, but what happens in South America is not america's problem. America can build a wall and deport the illegal aliens back, as any sovereign country would.
> The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
Yes, unfortunately, we do not imprison enough whites for their drug habits, and instead jail mostly non-whites. The solution is to put more white drug users in jail for a very long time or institute pretty harsh rehabilitation programs (i.e., not released until you're sober for X amount of time, and then close follow-up monitoring).
> The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
That's fine. I'm not against taxation, as long as the taxes are being spent on worthwhile things that are the purview of government. For example, if you told me taxes had to be raised 1% for 'diversity training' I'd say no, because diversity training is not the purview of government. If you told me taxes had to be raised 20% due to an increase in crime and the need to imprison and incarcerate more criminals, that would be okay. WE all have to share society's burdens, I just don't want to share the burden of things I don't want.
> The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
Indeed. So we should institute harsher criminal sentencing.
> So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests.
Dude... you live in a bubble. There is no group of 'right-leaning' people who 'state' their interests in some centralized publication.
The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?
> how bad it is for the black community,
The black community was the initial force behind the drug war
> how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl
More doctors and pharmacists should frankly be in jail.
> how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack
Great, those dealers should be imprisoned too. We have too few prisons in this country, given the level of crime and drugs.
> how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal
Alcohol and cigarettes have a long cultural history. They are luxuries tolerated for the culture. Not something innate.
> how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime
The victim is the person doing the drugs. It is well within the purview of government to punish people for victimizing themselves, to discourage the behavior. For example, many countries used to criminalize attempted suicide. I'm not going to turn this into an argument on that... but that is well within the government's purview.
Your argument is that the cost and side effects don't matter, the war on drugs must be won no matter what. You hand wave away the negative consequences (illegal immigration can be magically dealt with with better enforcement!). If that's your perspective then I can't change your mind because it's coming from a place of ideology.
"The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?"
What? Illegal immigration, taxes, crime and the economy are among the top issues for conservatives, and your drug war is making all of those things worse. If you think these aren't concerns for conservatives you are just wrong. Polling of conservatives establishes this clearly as does the rhetoric of leading conservatives. The economy, crime and illegal immigration were all big parts of Trump's platform.
I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.
>It's much harder to fight the stigma around anything that's illegal because it instantly gets equated with crime.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
It is also dangerous for a man as well. Some report being robbed or have their picture take upon arrival and blackmailed. It would be beneficial to both sides if people didn’t have to hide what they do.
They don't do that to ~25%(!!!!) of customers. You can't continuously run an above the table business involving card processors if even 1/10th of those people do a charge-back.
That 22% is a lifetime figure, not a per-occurrence figure. I've had my credit card info stolen several times, yet the fraud rate per transaction is way below 1%.
with an average number of escort per client at 26, and at least some of them being repeat customers (but possibly some of them being robbed multiple times), it doesn't look that much... Well below 1% per act.
If you're paying $1200 for "company", in cash, I reckon it would be unusual to also carry much more than a tip. My guess is the people who got robbed were at the low-cost end of the trade. Or maybe the men that got robbed were rapey anyway, and not a good bet for future business.
There's a recent HN thread on truck driving, which is legal and regulated, and has relatively less stigma. Yet the industry has apparently also figured out every possible way to skirt the regulations and abuse drivers physically and financially if possible. Granted, that's not a statistical assessment, but it at least suggests to me that legalization and regulation are not enough by themselves to make an occupation safe and wholesome.
Very few people (as a fraction of the population, spare me the wall of text about the edge cases) are negatively effected by trucking.
If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
>If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
In what way? has the population been negatively affected in places where it's already legal?
Of course it's not enough by itself, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Right now a lot of sex workers are afraid to even report crimes committed against them... hard to get much worse than that. Even a slight improvement is improvement.
Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
To charge high prices you have to be attractive. Old, overweight prostitutes can’t charge as much as models.
As someone who used services in the past, I don’t understand why anyone would spend any money at all on those… but they do find clients. Maybe it’s because if I lower my standards I can just easily find someone “for free” instead.
One must be really a hopeless ugly German to pay a woman from EE for sex. They hope for a relationship anchoring them in the country and need a guide through the ruthless rules and bureaucracy, you receive sex free of charge. Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine - you pick the flavour. Historical justice... not.
> One must be really a hopeless ugly German to pay a woman from EE for sex.
Not really, if you are interested in obtaining paid sex you don't have much choice. Most of the brothels are staffed by EE sex workers, been that way for well over a decade. German sex workers are rare in brothels, they work mostly escort and camgirl stuff.
The problem at its core is extreme poverty in EE - not many job opportunities that pay decent wages, so many people from there come to the nearest wealthy country aka Germany. Men go on the construction/agriculture gig job scene, women to prostitution... it doesn't pay much and the conditions both of work and living are extremely bad (just google "Arbeiterstrich München" if you want newspaper reports on the construction gig workers), but even this is better than life in their origin countries. As a result, German workers simply can't afford to work in this environment.
Many EE countries are already in EU, their citizens do not need to go through ruthless rules and bureaucracy to live in Germany, they just need to find any work there.
I've always been mildly curious, my first thoughts were "Less than I thought!".
Hear me out (criticism of my thinking on this is very welcome):
In LA's Ktown, a Domi (a job I had no idea existed just a few years ago... google if curious) charges a base rate of $100/hr, plus tips. For the client, there is no guarantee of nudity or any physical contact, though it's of course up to each individual what they're willing to do (and for how much).
From the perspective of the client, $100/hr buys you in-person company in a public setting with someone young, conventionally attractive, dressed skimpily. The person will (pretend to) politely listen to you as you talk, (pretend to) smile, (pretend to) laugh at your jokes, pour drinks for you, (pretend to) agree with your opinions, and, if they choose to, drink with you.
The market supports that price ($100/hr!) for work that does not require ANY sex as requisite. I imagined "entry level" sex work would be priced ~10x (min 7x) over work done (skimpily) clothed and in public, and that, like many other goods and services, "luxury" would have a multiplier over "entry level brand" between 5x and the stratosphere. (I guess with cars it's ~3x.)
These assumptions yield a price of $5k/hr for "luxury brand sex work", ~4x the empirical data. If we assume that "luxury" has a multiplier of just 3x (but I bet it's more!), then the ratio of the market price of sex work over somewhat similar (companionship, paid to be pretty and objectified) work done clothed and in a public venue, in the same city,... can be at most 4x.
I have no experience with this industry, I don't know what Domi is. I was simply looking at the numbers from my very limited (zero) understanding of the economics of sex work and economics in general. $1,200 is two months of my food budget, when I eat well, lol.
Somebody reading this comment (probably making minimum wage) might be thinking 20$ (1200/60) per day food budget is a luxury.
Anyway, all I was wondering is - a super tiny percentage of the population can afford to spend 1200 an hour, on anything. Must be nice to be that rich, lol.
In the past 20 years, I've been nearly homeless, working 2 minimum wage retail jobs 60/h week and cursing the lack of time or energy to improve my situation, and, at another extrema, regularly charged about $1,200/day for my time.
Right now I'm MUCH closer to the former than the later. I can tell you the latter is more fun! ;) But, even then, I'd spend $100/h for a luxury like fine dining, and spending $1000/h for a luxury would have seemed absurd. I imagine if, one made 10x the money, then spending $1000/h for a luxury might make sense?
I doubt it is more than a fetish or urban myth. If the market would be there, lots of people would be doing this. But there is no essential market for this.
I'm not sure that's true. There are wealthy, powerful men who can pay any hourly rate for sex and who are practically above the law in many parts of the world. It would be a mistake to assume that some of them wouldn't assault an escort in the not inaccurate belief that they can do whatever they want with impunity.
It is backed up by the author's analytics, though. Perhaps there are valid criticisms about her sampling methodology and the sample size at the very high end, but it's a good start.
9% of the workers reported never using a condom and a further percentage only use them sometimes. I suspect those are the majority of the 17% with an std.
Actually none of the zero-condom users reported getting a STD. My theory is that zero-condom users tend to be much more exclusive and to have fewer clients, or to do this closer to part-time?
Without looking at the numbers at all I'm pretty sure that number can be ignored almost completely. It's all but guaranteed to be vastly underreported, but fortunately none of the common STDs are deadly. HIV and hepatitis are both rare in Western countries and syphilis can be cured with antibiotics.
> Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
Median income is $100,000/yr. My impression (from HN) is this isn't abnormal for non-entry-level tech workers in the US.
Edit: I didn't realize this person was pointing out a typo.
Disagree. High end work of all sorts isn't the sort of thing you punch in and out of. Both have a high opportunity cost, in that in both cases you'll find it hard to work a similarly compensated second job. Also remember this is only "billable hours".
Edit: I just realized you've completely missed my point. I was replying to a comment the clients (i.e. not the sex workers) are crazy rich. I was presenting an argument for why they aren't.
Keep in mind my rate was 1200, but $100k was the median reported income for all clients who responded to my survey. I suspect the median income for clients who saw me would be much higher!
Compliments on a well communicated, insightful, and data driven look into a opaque industry that I've been curious about for a while!
I'm curious what you think about the relative price comparison to hostess work in LA outlined above. Either you're charging too little, or.. there's some.. interesting implied conclusions about the low relative cost (from the worker's perspective) for sex work! Or there's not enough information liquidity in the market? Or...
I Am Not An Economist, but... I can't shake the feeling there's a mispricing somewhere. Possibly a juicy topic for a paper, blog post, or Planet Money episode.
Also, that gonewild post is genius. Thanks for the laughs.
Well many people spend $12,000 a year on a hobby like travel, skiing, whatever. One escort a month is similar. Very few consume it hourly at the same volume as say Netflix.
It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
Also suprised the San Diego price is so high, when there is a red light district literally on the border in Tijuana, and those girls charge $60-$100/hr US to gringos (and less to spanish-speakers, locals, and people who pay in pesos)
This is the high-end price. It's not for every man and definitively not for every woman. While some intelligence is required to charge these high prices, some genetics lottery luck is also required.
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
High-end is basically differentiating yourself from average.
> You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
It's cheap if you are rich and worried about lawsuits, law enforcement, blackmailing, your reputation, etc... Suddenly, $1200/h is quite cheap.
Sex is a market, and like any market, it has theories that can explain it.
For example: in most places, most of the time, prostitutes charge the same "rate" as wives do, because they're suppliers in competition, and the market sets the price.
Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids. In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
If you step outside of your world for a second and look at it from the outside like an anthropologist might, you'll note that $1200/hour is about right for the "market price" in an nicer part of the world for affluent men. Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
> Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids.
What a strange perspective. In the US at least, having a wife makes you richer, as most women work, and you still live in a one bedroom, so your total income is significantly higher but your costs are only marginally higher. Getting married to another member of the workforce is a great way to build wealth.
You can buy a phone with the same spec as an iPhone for an eighth of the price. You can buy a car that goes from A-B for a fraction of the price of your Porsche. Those selvedge RRL jeans you like for 269 - Uniqlo do a version for 35. Is that Michelin star really better than Domino's? That is a lot to spend on just a phone, something to get you from A-B, something to cover your legs, something to fill you up, etc etc.
She sort of addresses it in the sentence that ends: "...and might be more likely to attract higher power men who are looking to “unlock” something they feel few other people have seen – your nudity."
I guess it's like anything. Things with a higher price feel more exclusive and we desire the things we can't have. If you can afford it, why would you skimp? If it's less affordable - maybe you'd prefer it to feel like an experience (at least in your own head) rather than 'one nut'?!
No steak is worth $200. But several people up-thread have made the point that $1200 per hour isn't that much, if you consider the alternatives (e.g. getting married - and if you can afford $1200 for a night out, then the divorce is probably going to be very, very expensive).
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much
$1200 an hour, with a minimum 1.5 hours, so $1800. In addition to a 20-minute roll in the hay, you get an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men.
So these "half the people on the planet": if they're not prostitutes, then you will have to date them. You are not going to cop if you take your date out to KFC. Even taking them to a posh restaurant won't guarantee you'll get your end away.
So let's say you manage to get a date 6 nights a week, and you shell-out for a meal and a show ($350 each?). Let's say half of them are people that interest you. Let's say half of those would consider bonking someone on the first date.
So you're out-of-pocket $2100, you've spent three evenings chatting to someone that didn't interest you, and two of the others want more meals and shows (but how many?)
I think my guesses are wild overestimates. I have no idea how one might ever get 6 dates a week. Most women won't bonk you on the first date. Far less than 50% of women are "interesting" (FSVO interesting).
If your time is scarce and valuable, your standards are high, and you have enough money to e.g. take holidays in nice places, then spending a couple of grand on a classy girl for the evening, with a guaranteed payoff, doesn't look insane.
This sounds completely off the mark for anyone that is moderately attractive, outgoing whilst possessing intelligence and social skills (I know, such a high bar to clear amongst SV types). The fact is, if one is above average in these areas, sex with attractive females doesn't cost one anything besides the time one puts in for the experience itself.
Throwing money at escorts is such a loser move (and the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you) that only someone who's never experienced the latter would seriously argue for paying 1200$ to have 20 minute sex with "an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men."
> The fact is, if one is above average in these areas
I'm 65. When I was 18, I was very scruffy, probably smelled bad, and had no money and no car. Women didn't exactly jump at me. I didn't try very hard to persuade them to. And there were no dating apps, and no websites.
I've never been into the "fuckem-and-chuckem" school of romance - I had a few one-nighters with pretty girls. If I was up for paying an escort, I'd pay for a nice one.
> the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you
So you've had the "escort experience"? Odd, then, that you'd say "throwing money at escorts is such a loser move". Maybe you chose badly?
I don’t need to have the escort experience to know it sucks. Not only have I had close friends that did (there was a group at Google that started out as typical virgin nerds and dabbled in high class escorts) but reading those escort testimonials should make it more than clear that the forced for-money experience is far inferior to actual sexual chemistry.
> This sounds completely off the mark for anyone that is moderately attractive, outgoing whilst possessing intelligence and social skills (I know, such a high bar to clear amongst SV types). The fact is, if one is above average in these areas, sex with attractive females doesn't cost one anything besides the time one puts in for the experience itself.
Sounds on the mark to me. I'm extroverted AF, intelligent, can make just about anyone laugh, and can form deep bonds and have deep conversations with people I literally run into off the street. Trying to date in SFO though? Purgatory. I'm not tall - I'm 5'10". I'm not muscular but also not fat - I'm 140lb. I'm a niche good - I don't have the universal appeal of Chris Hemsworth. Therefore, real life is where I'd sell best because I do well in conversation and - unfortunately - that takes so much time. Sooooo much time. The biggest issue is just getting in front of a beautiful woman. Once I'm in front - I can shoot myself in the foot and be okay with it. But, the fact that I can't even get in front of one is the hugest barrier to my lack of dating horror stories to tell friends. It's depressing.
It's the land of 49ers and an escort like Aella sounds appealing to me. I don't know if I'd ever do it for two reasons though. Firstly, I'm a bit too dedicated to a woman's pleasure and I'd worry an escort would be too much in their head to actually enjoy themselves fully. I already have to deal with that with women as it is. I cannot imagine how much in your own head you are as an escort. There was an aspect she touched on in her article that I was thinking myself as I was reading - which is that at least now she gets paid to have mediocre sex. I'm not really into mediocre sex. She did enjoy some but I wonder what it takes for an escort to enjoy it. I've only engaged in sexual acts with women who were obviously very into me (if only for the moment due to some hormones but at least they were into me for that night or two!). I don't doubt her abilities to fake it well but I also think many men are blind, apathetic, or as self-absorbed as many women I've encountered... and I'm not. So I don't think the sex would be good for either of us unless she was into me. Thus, would it be a good experience even if it was free? Probably not. If she was into me then why are we not just dating instead of some paid transaction? I mean if we're dating then she should really be trying to convince me to buy the $3m house like my last partner wanted... $2k transactions are cheap in comparison!
Secondly, the money aspect is very real to me. I might have a couple million in the bank and a 1%er income but the value proposition just is hard for me to reckon with. I think, "$2000+ for a nice night out with a pretty lady who will only see me as long as I keep paying $2k+ for every interaction... or my soft and delicate keyboard warrior hand for the low low price of self-loathing and depression?" For someone who is a comedian in his social circle - it's quite obvious which I'm going for. Self-hatred is just too good to pass up.
Also - 20 minutes? You're with a total babe and you're gonna just spend 20 minutes? What the f. Whenever that kind of opportunity presents itself to me - you have to wheel us both out after.
This is indeed cheap. The alternative is marriage that's gonna last 5 years and cost 1 million. That's 4k or 4 hours (discount for large order) per week - more than enough for most men who are able to marry such women. Sorry for my cynical view.
I actually read the entire thing. It was worth it imo. Some stand outs were her kind words about her clients (almost strange to see men as a class described with such positive words). She is clearly a very rational and intelligent person and this is a business to her like any other. Yeah I really don’t get why this stuff is illegal, even though I have no interest myself.
I don’t think the author intended to talk about men as a class and all the politics that comes with it, and as a man I would hate for discussions about my gender’s politics to be based specifically on sexual transactions. I mean, she had to talk a lot about her own safety and boundaries here. Not a very good sign for me.
Safety and boundaries also come up with taxi drivers, day laborers, pizza delivery folks, and many others - and objectively they end up dead more often near as I can tell.
Most folks here live pretty safe and cushy lives that the majority of humanity doesn’t get to enjoy. Real life for most people requires understanding and defending these things and making conscious decisions to protect them. it doesn’t require someone be doing sex work for it to be that way.
Her experience is not a good indicator or whether it should be legal or not . She is an exception even as an escort, and also high end escort work she describes here is very very different from the run on the mill prostitution.
Her strategy of avoiding trouble by keeping price higher even if lower frequency engagements may not be feasible for many, they may be unable to get clients at higher price points and like any biz pressure to generate revenue is immense.
One of the arguments of legalisation/decriminalisation/whatever you want to call it is that it brings it out from being underground and anyone can call law enforcement. However given the relationship with law enforcement in the US I’m not sure how well that would work.
The question of whether it's good and wholesome is orthogonal to the question of whether society should punish those who do it.
Scenario A: Resourceful, successful, happy. Should she be forced to accept dangerous working conditions and live under the constant threat of eviction, imprisonment, harassment and stigma? Why? What's the argument in favor of making her life difficult?
Scenario B: Physical or mental disability, unattractive, can't afford to refuse clients even though they make her unsafe, doesn't have any other way to pay for rent, food, meds and diapers. Should she be prevented from going to the police when someone beats, rapes or robs her? Should she be prevented from organizing with her friends for mutual protection? Should she be prevented from advertising online and instead forced onto the streets? Again, why? What's the argument in favor of making her life even more difficult?
The point is her experience is niche and unique, it is not indicative of how the industry at large actually operates so making any judgements would not be meaningful as OP was doing.
but the issue the article points out that she as an escort has no access to law, should something go wrong.
If an in-house hair dresser was assaulted/robbed/stolen from, they would be able to report it to the police. There would be a strong chance (well as high as any other crime) that it would be punished.
There would also be an opportunity to use/create a verification scheme for clients, but also ask for insurance/tax/qualifications for the hair dresser.
This is what operating in a "decriminalized" world looks like. You don't get harassed by the law, but they wont help you either.
Ideally we would have a world where sex work is legally allowed (so long as its not coerced) and allow those workers to form companies, hire security, use payment systems, have vetting functions. All of the services that would make life much less precarious.
I know that in the people I have encountered in the sex worker world (who are related but not the same as escorts) are very against "legalisation" as they fear it would lead to registers and no chance to limit or control anonymity.
So unless the moral objections are sorted, I don't see any future in these changes.
In the UK, being paid by a pro sex-worker for services in support of that work is a crime called "Living off immoral earnings", and it's treated quite a bit more seriously than prostitution. How do you tell whether the big guy in the car across the street is really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
Modern law has been complicated somewhat by a change in heart. There was an attempt at loosening the rules around prostitution(pre 2009), but they have subsequently been tightened a bit. In short its a mess.
> really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
this is where I diverge from sex workers on my opinion on this. They are pushing for discrimination. But this doesn't solve the coercion/security hired help issue.
The only practical way I can see it going away is by allowing sex workers to be fully legalised, as in form a company, have accounts, pay tax, be inspected by environmental health(or would it be CQC?). have three workers, but only pay tax for one? time for an inspection!
There are risks, and the stigma will force people underground. Holland and germany _still_ have a people trafficking problem
I suspect there are better ways, but unless it sex work can be done on the high street(well not literally), we will never truly over come the stigma, and subsequent exploitation of people.
>but the issue the article points out that she as an escort has no access to law, should something go wrong.
She has little to no access to state sanctioned violence. Call it what it is. If she has a business dispute she has no recourse, she can't sue the other party and get the state to put them in a cage if they don't pay. Drug industry also has the same problem and does its violence in-house. Formerly prostitution did in-house the violence necessary to settle business disputes (i.e. pimps) but the internet has changed the business model somewhat.
> so making any judgements would not be meaningful as OP was doing
The OP's judgment was that he saw no reason why this escort's business should be illegal. That's not a judgment on whether other forms of prostitution should be legal.
He said "this stuff" , which i assumed to mean escorting in general, he would have been more specific if he meant only hers ?
Also it hard from government to legalize only some form of prostitution over others even if politically that is possible, practically impossible to enforce.
Sure, escorting businesses like hers, where there's clearly no victim being trafficked or abused.
Also it's not at all difficult to legalize only some forms of prostitution. Consider this analogous situation: it's hard for a government to legalize only some forms of cutting people with knives, but we seem to do fine legally distinguishing surgery from assault with a deadly weapon.
I don't think that's true. I know a former escort pretty well and she's told me a lot about her work. It lines up very well with the article, except that she didn't have a high opinion of the very high end/expensive escorting because there simply isn't enough business available at the $1200/hr level. At least, not in Europe. It worked out much better for her to charge a more regular price and work full time.
Otherwise the rest is the same. Most clients are whatever. A few she got to know well and liked. She worked with another person who did screening for her, etc.
Perhaps the regular price for your friend is high end equivalent of 1200 ?. The author strongly says the population of an area makes a big difference in the rates you can charge.
Also mean income (as measured by her study of other workers) is $100,000 with her average rates of her sample around 500-600.
Effectively
= F(x)(y)(z)
X - number of people earning 200x the hourly rate
Y - % of that interested in paying for sex[1]
Z - relative beauty rank among service providers[2] in that area
You cannot control beauty much but you could change for location and optimize for all the factors to get best rate[3]. Or optimize for total money depending on what is preferred.
[1] age is strong factor so demographics is a good proxy metric.
Also perhaps friction with law is proxy for cultural acceptance and can be numerically scaled : fully legal, decriminalized, or criminal with quantum of punishment for scaling. And degree of enforcement measured by number of arrests / convictions etc.
[2] probably being 9 in LA wouldnt be the same as say Wyoming( demand would be lesser as a counter pressure)
Well they all tour because otherwise they saturate demand after a week or two in a local area. It's not about big disparities in local earning potential. Guys like novelty and even the ones that pick a girl and stick with her can't afford to come all the time.
No, prices are almost standardized, at least in the 'normal' escorting world. I was surprised by this at first. My belief had always been that it'd be super competitive and the hottest girls would charge the highest prices, but it's not like that. Turns out guys don't really care that much about what a girl looks like beyond a baseline level of beauty, which is why so many can get away with hiding their face.
What does matter a lot is what special services are offered (e.g. dominatrix stuff has a different price), and customer retention, which is 100% about whether you're nice and make the guys feel happy. The most successful girls are the ones that develop a loyal customer base. A few men even follow the girls around as they tour, but that's rare. Girls who are cold, uninterested etc don't get repeat custom and exhaust the area quite quickly.
Whether to go high end or not probably depends a lot on how much else you have going on in life. Aella presumably has lots of other projects like OnlyFans, social media etc. This girl was a full timer. It was her job, and she worked pretty long hours (not anymore). She didn't use social media or create websites or whatever. That's normal. Most escorts use ad sites but they aren't creating dedicated websites for themselves. This girl doesn't even use social media at all, not even in her personal life (and never did, and she's not old).
I did ask her once about the high end work but she indicated that at these sorts of prices you could get maybe one client a month, which just wasn't enough to be interesting given she could be making thousands per day reliably by charging a more normal price (a few hundred an hour). And of course with fewer customers you're a lot more exposed to one of them not coming anymore. The people saying "wow $1200/hr is a lot" are right, I suspect only in Silicon Valley are there a large enough percentage of über-rich but unlucky-with-women people to pay those sorts of rates. Most guys visited her around payday, it was a very cyclical business.
If you do ever get to know an escort on a personal level, or especially more than one, be aware that this is a world that will seem - to the average office worker at least - astoundingly racist. It's touched on in the article but is something else that surprised me a lot. All the girls have strong opinions about different races and a large number demand to know a client's race before they turn up and will simply refuse clients of particular races. There is no stigma or shame associated with such discussions or policies. In escorting there are no HR departments to tell people what to think, 'diversity' isn't a thing, they're all independent or at most work with one or two other girls who are just like them. Learning about this made me reflect a lot on to what extent the middle class office/tech world obsession with anti-racism is a function of the heavy level of filtering that goes on at the front door as part of selecting for skills, university, background etc. The belief that everyone is culturally homogenous and race is just a pigment, just doesn't fly amongst escorts. They learn to generalize about their client base very quickly. To them the link between race and culture is both real and of critical importance.
Interesting and insightful information. I wouldn't think $1000/ hour as lot from consultant PoV. The billable hours are only small part of the hours compared to time put in other related work, in this case activities like screening, adverts, keeping fit, healthcare, accessories, photo-shoots adverts etc. At the same time the sense I get from your post is few hundred/hour as mid range and not high end, maybe it is my lack of knowledge of how this works, but to me it feels like even that is expensive/high-end for most people out there.
I am surprised that saturation can happen in 2 weeks. Unless I am completely clueless about this, that is probably maybe 20-25 appointments (having more than sex 3-4 times a day especially professionally(she seemed to do most of the work) must be incredibility exhausting ). Even if more was possible I can't manage to schedule more than 3 external work meetings a day that is not video conference, scheduling definitely must be more challenging than that here.
It seems pretty small pool if saturated after only 20-25? Perhaps the screening process or narrow advertising ability ( only few platforms allow/ expensive) limiting the reach or competition is pretty heavy at this price point perhaps.
What you are describing regarding race is they find putting race a filtering criteria helps keep screening easier (Somewhat analogous to companies only hiring from tier-1 universities etc ). Better screening leads to better results in hiring rather than arbitrary criteria, I can attest to this in hiring, perhaps it applies here as well but it usually cheaper /easier to implement criteria than screen candidates better for companies. If institutional resources don't do it well, independent workers can hardly be expected to do better. I don't think anything is wrong in sex workers applying race or any type of criteria, it is risky and vulnerable business without any legal or social support, they have to err on the side of caution if they can.
I am not sure there has been exploration of the emotional stress and challenges for the client too. Imagine being rejected often(race or not) even when you are ready to pay for sex on top being unable to attract partners normally that would be quite hard to accept for anyone.
Also the amount of personal information clients are expected to share and references they need to have (while I understand why it is being asked) is pretty steep. There are so many vectors this information may leak from and could damage your life/marriage, lead to arrests etc. That has got to be stressful too.. I would be totally paranoid towards sharing any PII, I guess a good chunk of rich men in the valley would also hesitate on that.
Only 3-4 appointments would have been considered a bad day, by this woman. You'd think it'd be exhausting but they are usually young and have a lot of energy, and 3-4 hours work is a lot less than most people do per day. The men come to them usually. For the high throughput cases they team up with another girl who pretends to be them on the phone and handles the scheduling and screening because that's also a full time job.
So within two weeks (working 6-7 days per week) it's easy to pack in like 80 different punters and there's a limited supply in most towns. Most men aren't visiting, and there are plenty of other girls competing for the business. In a big city sure you can't saturate it but there's also correspondingly much more competition and the police are more active, so some of them prefer to avoid the cities and stick to the smaller conurbations.
Most men don't share any PII. They pay in cash and may or may not use their real names. If they get "banned" it's the phone number that gets banned.
I guess that's another aspect that differs from what I heard, then. I don't think it's normal for customers to share their real identity or be required to do so.
My experience was not that niche and unique; I tried to consistently show data around how prices might impact your experience. The amount you charge is not correlated with the majority of the questions I asked sex workers.
In some Nordic countries, it's not illegal to sell sex, but it is to buy it. What do you think about that? Do you think making the men fear the law, but not the women, would do anything to help the women?
I guess the government's objective is to kill the business completely, which is about as realistic as prohibiting alcohol.
I think that situation is somewhat absurd. People in general don’t think sex between consenting adults is wrong, so why is it suddenly when money is exchanged? And, at least, Sweden still has the law that any form of procurement of prostitution is illegal, which means it is still impossible for a prostitute to for example legally pay a guard, or even use the money to pay rent.
This increases competition of sex workers for johns, artificially drives prices down, gives johns greater bargaining power over sex workers, and doesn’t fix the problem of johns trying hard to remain anonymous and requiring situations where you’re less able to go to the police if you wanted. Sex workers hate this.
I am aware of her view from the article. The approach I believe is more aimed at involuntary victims not being further victimized or being threatened with being reported to law enforcement as a mechanism of control. The sex workers Aella is sampling and interacting with may or may-not be a representative of this segment or Nordic countries have bigger problems with this than in United States
I don't have an opinion(or data) on whether this is effective or is good approach or not, just wanted point out that it is less about driving demand down, they are not trying to criminalize johns(it already was) but trying to address issues on the workers side perhaps ineffectively.
But in the current situation the buyer will be a criminal whether the sex worker is there voluntary or as a victim of trafficking, or even underage. So it's very unlikely a buyer would ever report to the police if they suspect that the sex worker is there involuntary or is abused by her pimp.
The law is supposedly there to protect the sex workers, but you don't do that by forcing into hiding and making it unlikely that any crimes against them will be reported by anyone else.
If they really cared about the sex workers they would instead make it easy for them to get anonymous support with health, in particular mental health, and drug abuse problems. And institute a hotline for sex buyers to call without risk getting into any legal troubles if they suspect that a sex worker needs any help for whatever reason.
Laws against sex work traditionally also make victim(involuntary or forced workers or trafficked) also the criminal.
It is extremely hard to differentiate who is involuntary legally even if there was strong provisions for it and sex workers mostly can not pay for expensive legal counsel who can make that case.
Nordic laws are an attempt to not decriminalize sex work at the same time not punish the workers at all.
It lets SWERFs pat themselves on the back and feel good by pretending they're not punishing sex workers, only the "evil" men who provide sex workers with income. In practice we have seen in both Sweden and Norway that police systematically pressure landlords and hotels to evict sex workers from rented apartments/rooms under threat of pimping charges. Immigrant sex workers have been deported after going to the police to report crimes.
With "systematically pressure", you can actually say "tries to enforce the law"[1], if they're aware that the premise is used for swapping sex for money, they need to make it stop. Simply paying for a not-for-work apartment or should not fall under that legal space, though.
They really don't need to. They are kicking people out of their homes because of a law that shouldn't exist. They could just not prioritize it and free up resources for other crimes.
Your data collection was insightful[1] thank you for that.
All your caveats upfront on the quality of sampling is more than I have seen in many academic papers.
I don't have experience either as service provider or client to give a professionally informed comment here.
However having said that, sex work in general (even only in the United States) starts at lot less than 200-300$/hour in the lower end of the your study[2]. It is a great study and amazing subject testimony but it does only cover mid to high end of the spectrum.
As a basis for policy making covering the lower end of the spectrum and cover specifc policy issues and also cover other stakeholders like healthcare, law enforcement, welfare etc would be important.
I am sure there are lot more qualified people than me you are already in touch/working with, however I am happy to offer my help with statistics or code or lit review and publish formally /research proposal if you wish to go down that route.
[1] Your content, there are some parallels with how startups publish quality industry reports as a brand recognition strategy that I found very interesting.
[2] you have indicated the limitations in many places quite clearly am not finding faulting with your study .
How do they lose their jobs? I get that a dealer who just sold weed now has to compete with legal alternatives or leave the sector. How so with sex work? You think the increased competition would put them out of work?
What is a marginalized worker in the cannabis sector?
I think you are over estimating a cross over between these customers. Cheap Mexican brick weed is still being sold because legal cannabis is pricing poorer users out of the legal market.
Legal stores are employing people legitimately and paying taxes, so I don't mind if some dealers now have to quit or diversify. The more jobs we have in legal drugs the fewer required in the illegal drug trade. This is a net positive to society.
Treating men who hire prostitutes with respect is kind, but not necessarily honest. More or less a requirement is that they not care if the person they're having sex with hates it. They're a distinct class of people and not reflective of all men.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.
Although as a male I highly support that sex work be legal, and acknowledge it as legitimate work, I do not tend to honestly respect this type of work (besides the courage to do it and such). I find it quite unfair be able to make so much money for relatively low effort (at least it feels that way despite the downsides/dangers).
But I must say that this escort is super smart and has a really good sense of business. This article also gave me some newfound respect for escorts for the fact that although on the surface they seem to mostly just use their bodies, they do put in a lot of effort on the business and strategy side which people don't talk about.
> I find it quite unfair be able to make so much money for relatively low effort
I hope you hate capitalism then. It's all about supply and demand. As a gay man with some friends who escort, their rates are much lower, both for obvious reasons (it is ridiculously easy for most gay men to find other men to have sex with) and less obvious ones (IMO there is much less of a stigma among gay men for escorting, and at least friends I knew who did it expressed little shame at doing it).
It is absolutely supply and demand. I meant girl escorts when I wrote what I wrote. I find it unfair that it you're born a girl and are pretty, you have this option.
I don't see how the "men" part is relevant of what you are saying. The "rich" part is a good point: that's certainly more unfair.
I'm thinking that if men and women of equally poor background, women have this escort option that men don't (obviously they do, but it pays far less good on average than women).
Just that men earn more money and have more wealth than women when looking at population averages. In many cultures women are expected to marry and look after the kids while the men work, and that expectation carries over into education opportunities, parental support, hiring decisions and so on.
I read the entire article.
By making a lot of relatively low effort I mean selling something for a lot that's not a expensive items or valueable experienced labor.
And like I said, before I thought this was all low effort work, and through this article I got to see the high effort business side.
This is a fantastic article: informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny. And it’s especially interesting to see it posted here at HN, because while reading it I kept thinking there are some solid lessons here about entrepreneurship, sales, and product pricing that could certainly be applied to your average start-up SaaS.
I mean, anchoring your price high, to better capture the businessman/enterprise market? And that this market also happens to be less likely to be time-suck jerks about little issues, or constantly asking for product changes/features? Literally better b̶a̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶buck for your bang.
And it’s right out of the classic @patio11 essays, too. Charge more, indeed.
"I’ve had many clients that I remember fondly and who mean a lot to me. One client I would regularly hold in close skin-to-skin contact as he cried, and I cried with him; another was young and vibrant and too big for the small world around him. Another was a quadriplegic, and yet another was a talented writer who valued rarely seen things in me and encouraged me to do great things without ever once implying escorting was beneath me. Another whose wife had recently died and found me as his first foray into being with another woman, because he couldn’t bear to fully date another person yet. I’ve had clients figure out who I am and show up asking me to tripsit them on psychedelics, wildly successful CEOs who treated me as an intellectual equal, or people who were dying of cancer and didn’t want to go out without another bang (I recently looked up one of my favorite clients and instead found his obituary)."
Interesting that the author does porn too. Typically, escorting is frowned upon in the porn industry. There are concerns over STDs, and porn performers prefer to co-star with those having sex exclusively with porn stars.
This is a fantastic article, echoing what others have said "informative, well-written, thoughtful, human, and funny".
After being shocked at how low the price is, considering how the market prices a related job (see my other comment for details), the second thought I had is that there might be some interesting low MRR startupish product opportunities.
I think the problem is your idea of the patrons and their reasons for hiring escorts. Maybe it's just me, but "go find someone in a bar" isn't even in the same ballparks.
As the author mentions, some clients are busy and just want a sure thing. Others are cheating on their partner and don’t want to involve a civilian who might blow up their spot.
I’d say that most important is that she was SUPER thoughtful about the experience she provided to her clients. Things like identifying non-latex condoms to avoid allergies, wearing a short necklace so it won’t slap him in the face.
Whenever I pay more for something and am glad I did, it’s almost always because I am impressed by the attention to detail. Then again, maybe that’s because I, too, pay attention to detail.
Sex/conversation/whatever with a person you really like and feel that you click with, who focuses all her skill attention on giving you the time of your life, is completely different than with some random person you would rather not wake up next to in the morning. There are lots of men with that kind of money to spend but only one Aella.
> Cant most people just go hook up at a bar or smth if they're that desperate?
Most people can "just go hook up" at a bar or whatever, but then again, most people don't pay for escorts. Some people can't "just go hook up", though, and I would assume those people form a significant part of escorts' client base (the author described these as inexperienced young people). The author also described other motivations, like busy rich people, and people wanting to cheat on their partners.
This price is on the high end. But many people like myself don't have the courage, confidence, looks, or complex social skills required to succeed by going to a bar and trying to pick up a girl. Then when you look at how much time and disappointment you'd have to go through to do the same through something like Tinder, then suddenly paying a few hundred starts to make sense. And quote from somewhere, "you're not paying for the sex, you're paying her to leave after".
The funniest part of this article (in the context of being posted on HN) is that the author separately mentions engineer and software engineer in her list of client professions. That settles it - normal people think they're different.
This comes up often enough here. The number of people who do argue that “software engineer” is a kind of engineer, alongside “mechanical”, “civil”, etc, is always dismaying to me. I’ve always maintained that it’s merely a common title within the software industry, based on a loose analogy. Similar to “software architect”, it’s evocative, not literal.
That is interesting, thanks. What I’ll agree to is that it is possible in principle to vary the extent to which you apply traditional engineering concepts to software development. But I believe that’s good ol’ cross-disciplinary insight (are genetic programmers biologists?) And maybe if you turn that knob all the way up, maybe you could be said to be doing engineering. But I’m not convinced of that last part yet, and I am really not convinced that it would be desirable industry-wide. I really, really like the way I work, and so do my superiors, and seemingly so do our customers; and I didn’t learn this by studying engineering or trying to think like an engineer.
But perhaps most importantly, I think we all know (right?) that the title Software Engineer is not, in practice, currently imparted consistently with how much “real” engineering is being applied.
My impression (which kind of matches the blog series) is that that "like an engineer" bit is a bit overhyped in these discussions. E.g. a good chunk of what I do is embedded software, so I sometimes work with EEs that have designed the hardware my software is supposed to run on - and the range of how systematically (or not) they approach things isn't any smaller than the one you find in software. (Now I wonder if they also have discussions of "if you are just combining parts on a board and not designing your own ICs, are you really an engineer?", but given what I've seen I doubt it - they seem to care mostly about who has the formal right to claim the title)
Yeah, that's my experience too. And I can report, from working with EEs and talking to EE family members, that they do sometimes engage in that sort of my-subdiscipline-is-realer-than-yours one-upmanship too, but more often it's about using "outdated" design practices vs. "immature" ones, or about the appropriate balance of planning vs. exploration for a given project. All very familiar territory for programmers, though there are some differences.
This is from a group of sex workers who appear to be screening their clientele. I wonder how high the number would be among sex workers who don't have the same amount of financial safety net that someone who can pick and chose their clients has.
I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place. I always hear how sex work just needs to be regulated and everything would be fine, but how does one prosecute something that happens in a private setting, behind closed doors?
It should be decriminalized, not regulated. I would have liked to have been able to go to the police about the client who assaulted me, but unfortunately this didn't cross my mind as an option.
There are lots of bad things that arguably shouldn't be illegal but suppressed. Smoking, abortion, prostitution, drugs, etc. I think for society to fully embrace decriminalization there needs to be a diversion mechanism. Cigarettes have taxes and programs to quit. What would the prostitution equivalent be?
> I think for society to fully embrace decriminalization there needs to be a diversion mechanism.
Yes, let's make men who want to pay for sex watch an hour-long video extolling the virtues of "real" relationships.
The reality is that there are a lot of men who enter into "normal" relationships with women in large part because it gives them easier access to sex. Not all of them are happy. Lots of them overextend themselves financially, and generally do things they wouldn't otherwise do, to keep their girlfriends satisfied.
These are less direct exchanges, but they are exchanges nonetheless.
I'm living in East Asia, which has made me think more about the exchanges that take place in relationships between men and women. Here, it's common to see men with expressionless looks on their faces lugging their girlfriends' handbags, spending 20 minutes helping them take cutesy photos, pushing strollers carrying not children but tiny, professionally-groomed pups, etc.
As a warm-blooded man, you'd have a hard time convincing me that access to sex isn't a big reason these men are putting up with this stuff. Why do men who pay for sex need a diversion mechanism but the men who totally lose themselves in a relationship don't?
Arguably both do. I am well aware that both prostitution and 'real' relationships both exist on the same continuum of exchange. What I would like to see are long term studies on the outcomes in prostitution and non prostitution communities.
And then what? You're going to tell consenting adults what they're allowed to do based on some subjective analysis of these?
What happens if the men who pay directly for sex report shorter relationships and have lifespans 6 months shorter than men who don't, but they tell you they're happier? Or what happens if you discover that men who pay for sex while in relationships report longer relationships?
Why are you already bringing up disincentives? Your comments hint that you've already decided there is something inherently wrong with paying directly for sex. You're totally dismissing the possibility that research might very well find that prostitution is a net positive for individuals, and that most of the associated negatives are caused by its criminalization.
You're right, research could show that it's an unmitigated benefit and I would have to reevaluate my position. I cannot however live in the world of hypotheticals. My present understanding is based on existing information available.
Philosophically I am wary of the coercive power of money in relationships. The economy is misunderstood enough, I can't imagine the situation is better when it comes to intimacy markets. Can I coin the phrase Psychological economics?
I see parasocial relationships as something like a new virus that the human psyche has no immunity towards. People naturally think in emotional rather than transactional terms.
It's not hypothetical that prostitution is often called the world's oldest profession for a reason. Power dynamics that can seem unfair and might be abused exist in human relationships, like it or not, and have since time immemorial. Don't even look at the animal kingdom. It's not prettier.
Also, the relationship between an escort and a client is absolutely not a "parasocial relationship." You're abusing that term. Escorts and their clients have real relationships, even if you have a problem with the fact that they're based on transactional intimacy.
Yes, you're right. I had decriminalization in mind, but maybe chose the incorrect word.
And to elaborate on the prosecution part, in the wake of #MeToo, a lot of people came out with their stories, but not many of them pursued a legal route. I got the feeling that proving many of those allegations would be difficult in a legal system and whatever cases that did go through the legal system had a preponderance of evidence - along with immense social pressure - backing them up (think Bill Cosby/Harvery Weinstein). This is what made me wonder how much of a deterrent decriminalization/regulation would be on sexual assaults. Do we have to use public shaming, like in #MeToo, as a deterrent mechanism?
That's the Nordic model which has been a collosal failure. The workers get harassed by both police and clients alike, they are no better off. Actual legitimacy would allow workers to better organize and protect themselves, and would also better mitigate human trafficking by leveraging regulation. Germany is working on improving its laws to this end.
Its not clear that those a different sets of people. Just because they screen their clients now, doesn't mean that they always have. Unfortunately, getting personally assaulted might be the reason they now screen their clients so well.
> I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place.
I doubt we would ever get it down to the background rate, but having a high base rate means there is a lot of room for improvement.
Just legalizing it would probably help. Having an above ground would likely improve the quality the background check network, and would increase the accessibility of information on how to be a sex worker with relative safety.
Beyond that, the potential to have a good relationship with police would probably be a big help. I doubt it would see much actual use (who wants to risk a reputation of getting their clients arrested), however at least some people would be more careful if they thought there was a chance that the sex worker could report them.
There is also the option of proper brothels, with panic buttons and bouncers listening in for screams.
Before determining how you should police sex work or customers thereof, you might want to contextualize it with an understanding of both reports and estimates of unreported sexual assaults of women in the general population.
The article reads like an advertisement. She claims to have had many intimate, beautiful experiences with johns but she's charging $1200/hr. How beautiful can a purchased experience be? Plus, the whole thing reenforces regressive stereotypes wherein men are valued for their money and women for their bodies.
Regardless of whether prostitution should be legalized on liberal grounds, it is not prosocial behavior and it is unfortunate that the taboo against it seems to be decaying.
Why should we keep being controlled by the regressive moral taboos of puritan America?
Is it a law of physics? What is the problem with bodies? Are smart people superior to beautiful people?
Live theater, concerts, and therapy are all purchased experiences, too, and they can all be pretty powerful experiences on either side of the transaction. I don't see why escorting that includes conversation would be any different.
This is a fantastic article. I hope this goes viral. Sex work should be legalized, regulated, and protected. Escorts should be able to call the police without fear of being arrested if they are abused.
I have several female friends who are escorts, or rather "providers", and the term most frequently used for the men (as OP said) is "hobbyists". However, they don't really see "hobbyist" as derogatory as OP claims. Which is interesting.
I'm saddened that she describes such a solo experience. There is (was before COVID) a weekly meetup at a local restaurant where the providers got to know each other and swap stories. There was a back channel network where they could blacklist individuals. It was a cohesive group that looked out for each other. They even had presentations on how to launder money through Etsy. As OP said, the IRS will notice!
In addition, some women jumped in for a short period, but some stick around. One friend have been at it for over 15 years: there long-term relationships are pretty amazing to hear about. We dated and I would sometimes get de-identified summaries of fetishes.
There are "old timers" in this profession just like programming. This OP is like a ReactJS dev talking to CGI-BIN devs. I use this analogy becuase one of my friends worked mostly with programmers and went by "RubyGetsRailed" online.
EDIT: I hope I'm not mansplaining, but it is a diverse community that exists everywhere and I wanted to share the variations I've encountered.
Throwaway because I'm drawing on firsthand experience from illegal activity.
I think it's important to highlight the diversity of sex work. This one passage caught my attention:
> SeekingArrangement – This website, unlike the above, professes to definitely not allow escorts, and makes it difficult to be explicit about it. Most men connecting through the website anticipate paying around 50-70% less, as women tend to be willing to accept less money if you give them a veneer of not being a real sex worker. You can still attempt to do clear sex work here though – “PPM”, or pay-per-meet, indicates that you want to be paid per meeting, and this is the way to start out the discussion. Seeking Arrangement also had the lowest correlation with arrests,
Nearly all of my experience with sex work (as a client) is off Seeking Arrangment. For those unfamiliar it's a site for people to engage in "sugar dating", where a "sugar daddy" compensates a "sugar baby" to spend time with him, ostensibly unconnected to any expectations of sex. I find these terms cringeworthy, I'll call it compensated dating. In practice there's almost always expectations of sex. There's definitely a sizeable overlap between SA and traditional escorting sites, browse both and you'll come across the same profiles with moderate frequency. But in general, "sugar dating" involves a sizeable chunk of activities beyond having sex. It's expected to take dates out to dinner, movies, and other activities one would normally do on dates.
I think Aella is being a bit snide when she calls this "the veneer of not being a real sex worker". Almost all of the people I met considered it sex work and weren't under any illusion about the fact that money was changing hands in exchange for sex. When I asked why they preferred compensated dating rather than escorting the reasons were primarily twofold:
* Safety. It's not uncommon for people to meet in person once or twice before agreeing to meet for sex. These initial meetings are almost always in public or semi-public places (restaurants, bars, parks, malls). Most people give each other real names after meeting in person. I suppose this could also reduce safety, but there's a M.A.D. element of this that seems to work.
* Sense of connection, quality of experience. Many of the women on SA that I met spoke negatively of instances where men only saw them for an hour to have sex and didn't want to spend time together outside of the bedroom. Do they really just care about "the veneer of not being a sex worker"? Maybe, but I get the sense that many genuinely have a more enjoyable experience - or at least more tolerable experience - meeting someone few times platonically before having sex.
Speaking from the male perspective here, I'm really not sure why someone would prefer escorting over compensated dating. Aella is right that it's 50-70% less expensive. Maybe a bit less if one factors in cost of meals and activities. But $/hr of time spent together is easily 4-5x less than escorting. Personally I'm the type that sees the expectation of spending time together outside of the bedroom as a positive rather than a negative, so it's a win on both counts. Between $1200 for 90 minutes with someone and $400-700 in exchange for having dinner with someone, sex, taking a bath together and talking, and spending the night together the latter is way preferable.
The only potential negative is possibly the overlap of sugar dating and real relationships. I know both men and women who have moved in with, and in one instance gotten married to, people they met off SA. The one negative experience I had was with someone who wanted to have a real relationship and I did not, leading to a falling out and stuff being said about me - fortunately nothing that actual led to significant repercussions.
My impression that sugar babies don't think of it as sex work is based off reading sugar baby forums, but it's possible that there's different subclusters of sugar babies with different attitudes!
I was squarely on the decriminalize camp but as with everything, life tends to give you more perspectives.
The ethical calculus appears to be more complicated than the straightforward 2 consenting adults engaged in a victimless crime.
Consider the current rates of single mothers, the increasing trends of broken homes and higher divorce rates, one is forced to really examine what is under the belly of this beast.
Is there causality, or not?
Do kids pay the price from easier access to family breakups? Do these side deals even lead to breakups at all, or were they just serve to speed up the inevitable ?
I would like to understand if there is a way to estimate the impact of any broad change in policy.
Thing do bode well in one respect: AFAIK, decriminalizing marijuana in portugal led to less drug abuse.
Considering that prostitution has been around forever, and divorce has been long-term falling since the initial transition when it became legal and socially acceptable, I think you should examine some of your assumptions.
This strikes me as a weird things to say tbh, but in the spirit of the article I decided to try to look at it a bit more rationally and not sure this is wrong to say, but I still don't like it and I'm not exactly sure why.
Well the article should give you some glimpse into the mindset behind transactional sex. I see Tweets I like, and photos of a woman with a good body. Her rate was $1,200, I am willing to pay. Consenting adults, consenting exchange, it might not be for you, and it might make you feel gross, that’s OK as you don’t try to deny us the right to make the exchange. Of course not relevant since she is not escorting now.
Perhaps his objection is a bit different( or maybe am projecting). It may feel more wrong that you are talking about it in a forum, rather than engaging with her privately
She’s posting in the replies here so maybe she’ll say whether this feels like an affront to her humanity. Still, this conversation around why it might be icky seems philosophically meaningful.
Going by post doesn't seem to indicate she is former. In the last paragraph she mentions her concerns about escorting in the future given her blog detailing the industry in this detail.
Many escorts promote themselves via Twitter. I’ve seen a few escorts after following them on Twitter. It’s not just about sex. Some people have a tough time connecting to people and this is a good option to see what the person is about and then making a booking.
I likely will never be able to advertise escorting as Aella due to legal risks and due to Onlyfans removing anyone who reveals they're an active escort.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadGood SWE in Europe - $40k-$60k
Good SWE in US. . . . - $250k-$350k
300k+ is, from what I gather, very high for US, whereas 50k is more or less entry level in western EU. But take my impression as a data point (or a cluster), not the ultimate source of truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_sca...
> I required deposits of 20% for long appointments (6+ hours), because I had a lot of time booked up that would be a painful loss if they cancelled. Deposits are hard to do because everybody wants anonymity and payment processers are cruel; I typically accepted amazon gift cards or crypto.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.
There are arguments against prostitution as a victimless crime, but it is not straightforward in any argument to demonstrate victim and perpetrator like it is with assassination, burglary, assault, etc.
Sorry, if you found my comment rude, i assure you that this was not my goal.
You used abortion there. I don't think we could get a consent from fetus, law just assumes that female parent have a power over it's life until some development point.
People consensually participate at gambling, dueling, pyramid schemes, become criplled drugs and alcohol addicts, selling themselves and they family to slavery, do suicide.
Nor consent, nor something being an old and persistent part of the human culture are good reasoning.
I don't think you consider assassination and prostitution equivilant crimes, yet you made the comparison. Why? What's the point of taking something out of context to invalidate it?
If you have reasons for opposing the legalization of sex work, they're completely lost on me. Maybe start there instead of pedantry.
Amen to that. As an ignorant outsider looking in, the first thing that comes to mind is the possible huge safety benefits gained by collective bargaining. Even if it's not certified and recognized by the NLRB, there's gotta be something.
It's been legal in licensed settings for quite a while, but they're now changing to make it legal in more situations in response to requests from solo sex workers. I'm rather happy with the situation (and new improvements) as a client and my understanding is that workers are happy about it.
https://www.vic.gov.au/review-make-recommendations-decrimina...
Like all regulation should be...
No woman wakes up one day and says 'I want to sell my body for sex to the highest bidder' unless forced to by circumstance.
Few people wake up wanting to sell their procreative parts to the highest bidder.
If that is true, then a thought experiment would be: should refusing to enter prostitution be a grounds for losing jobseekers' welfare, eg. jobseekers allowance [1]?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jobseekers-allowa...
I agree with the general principle that not all labour is the same, but I don't think prostitution is in a class of its own. If you paid me enough I'd probably do it for a week and then retire.
Maybe this means that you don't really like your job? If you had access to the same goods as everyone else around you, more or less, and liked what you are doing, then doing it for a week stops making sense, doesn't it?
Sex is not just another activity. Due to its effects of potentially creating a new human being, it is a category unto itself and deserves special treatment.
For example, would you sell your pancreas? Why not? Is it because a vital organ is not in the same class of goods as say a lightbulb?
The same is true of selling sex, which is not just some social interaction, but a social interaction that can literally make a new person
Your kind of equivocation is morally lazy and conveniently abiological.
Speaking of lazy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison. Depriving yourself of a vital organ is not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
"Making a new person" is also a complete red herring. You can hire a surrogate to carry a baby to term, which is also paying to use someone else's genitals to actually make a new person. The only meaningful difference is the absence of "sex", so I think it's clear what you really have a problem with.
In the vast majority of first world countries this is illegal for precisely the reasons I described. Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
> not the same as renting out your genitals for a limited time.
Given the genitals ability to produce life that can last many years beyond yourself, you're absolutely right. Renting out your genitals is much worse.
No it's not. The potential to make humans is not equal to the intentional act to create humans, just like the potential to commit murder is not the same as the intentional act to commit murder.
> Only extremely poor countries or barbaric jurisdictions, such as California, allow paid surrogacy.
You definitely need to update your list, because more states are surrogate friendly than aren't.
In capitalistic society everything can be called labour, including selling people, their organs and their genitals for sex.
Even supposing few people want to do that, I don't see how it follows that nobody should be permitted to do it. You're missing a critical step.
For example, we regulate ivf, don't we? Why? Because the action undertaken has the ability to create new life.
The same is true of prostitution. The action undertaken is of a wholly different nature. Namely it can create people, which is different than any other labor.
Tolerating homosexual prostitution is actually more akin to your other analogies in that the action undertaken is not special. Although anal intercourse in general ought to be discouraged due to its deleterious health effects.
No, we don't regulate it because it can create new life, we regulate it because it falls under healthcare for which doctors have a certain duty of care, and if IVF is done poorly it can cause all sorts of deleterious health effects for the mother and the implanted embryo. These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
> These considerations do not apply to prostitution since we have contraception and abortion.
Whose burden falls solely on the women, and for which large portions of the population would object to the use of abortion as birth control. Even many pro-abortion people object to abortion's use as birth control, because they view abortion as justified murder, but murder nevertheless.
A lot of people would be willing to become a janitor at 3 times the market wages for janitors. A lot of people who are physically able to do construction work would take the job at 3 times the market rate for construction work. Not a lot of people would be willing to become a prostitute at 3 times the market rate for prostitutes.
This means that prostitution is much farther on the scale of "forced into by circumstances" than janitors or construction workers.
Citation please. I find it very hard to believe that prostitution is immune to the same price based supply and demand forces that every other labor pool is.
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
sure... and that's the best argument to recriminalize. Having yet more drugs that disrupt mental faculties is not a good thing
I believe inimited government, not small government.
If you need a giant government to enforce law then you need a big government.
For example, if you have a government of say 100 people, and they decided to hire 10 people and start a fast food restaurant I would be against this new government of 110 people. On the other hand, if the same government needed to hire 5000 people to combat drugs, I'd support that.
Why? Because limited government means government should only do a limited number of things. Opening a fast food restaurant is not the proper place of a government. Enforcing drug law is. Government can be as large as necessary to accomplish that.
- The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
- The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
- The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
- The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests. Add to this a number of other reasons (how bad it is for the black community, how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl, how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack, how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal, how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime), and the case is clear cut to me.
I'm not a libertarian, but libertarians -- unless they're of the high school variety -- are not carte blanche small government. They are certainly limited government. Perhaps you should begin by not arguing against high-school-level strawmen.
> The drug war is indirectly causing more illegal immigration into the US because it's destabilizing South America.
Almost certainly, but what happens in South America is not america's problem. America can build a wall and deport the illegal aliens back, as any sovereign country would.
> The drug war is shifting large profits away from US pharma and into foreign narco gangs, which is bad for GDP growth and therefore the strength of the nation.
Yes, unfortunately, we do not imprison enough whites for their drug habits, and instead jail mostly non-whites. The solution is to put more white drug users in jail for a very long time or institute pretty harsh rehabilitation programs (i.e., not released until you're sober for X amount of time, and then close follow-up monitoring).
> The drug war means taxation needs to be higher because it's expensive.
That's fine. I'm not against taxation, as long as the taxes are being spent on worthwhile things that are the purview of government. For example, if you told me taxes had to be raised 1% for 'diversity training' I'd say no, because diversity training is not the purview of government. If you told me taxes had to be raised 20% due to an increase in crime and the need to imprison and incarcerate more criminals, that would be okay. WE all have to share society's burdens, I just don't want to share the burden of things I don't want.
> The drug war creates more street crime, which ranks highly in what right-leaning people care about.
Indeed. So we should institute harsher criminal sentencing.
> So I just don't understand why right-leaning people (not just libertarians) are so actively voting against almost all of their stated interests.
Dude... you live in a bubble. There is no group of 'right-leaning' people who 'state' their interests in some centralized publication.
The only people who 'state' right-leaning people's interests are left-wing publications trying to create strawmen. Perhaps listen to others instead of imagining their interests?
> how bad it is for the black community,
The black community was the initial force behind the drug war
> how poor whites are being literally killed by fentanyl
More doctors and pharmacists should frankly be in jail.
> how it pushes people into more dangerous and cheaper drugs such as ice and crack
Great, those dealers should be imprisoned too. We have too few prisons in this country, given the level of crime and drugs.
> how hypocritical it is for alcohol and cigarettes to be legal
Alcohol and cigarettes have a long cultural history. They are luxuries tolerated for the culture. Not something innate.
> how morally questionable it is to punish a victimless crime
The victim is the person doing the drugs. It is well within the purview of government to punish people for victimizing themselves, to discourage the behavior. For example, many countries used to criminalize attempted suicide. I'm not going to turn this into an argument on that... but that is well within the government's purview.
I vote conservative for the most part. I'm just not one of those authoritarian dick head conservatives that try to control other people's lives over victimless crimes. And no, the person who smokes pot isn't a victim. Tobacco and alcohol are worse for the body than the occasional vape, so I completely reject your premise.
Do I think it's wise.... No. Our culture is too dependent on it.
If there was a country where alcohol wee not popular, I'd think it would be a good idea to keep it illegal.
Look, drinking is fun, but it's a luxury and can be dangerous.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
I can only imagine the courage it takes to write something like this (you briefly hinted at the end).
Really appreciate your efforts to bring light and improve safety in a difficult line of work.
I too hope it doesn't affect your work, although I suspect you would get some unwanted attention with this exposure.
> 92 were stolen from.
Wow, that's a 22% chance of being robbed.
If you're paying $1200 for "company", in cash, I reckon it would be unusual to also carry much more than a tip. My guess is the people who got robbed were at the low-cost end of the trade. Or maybe the men that got robbed were rapey anyway, and not a good bet for future business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28916771
If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
In what way? has the population been negatively affected in places where it's already legal?
Jeez, that is insane! good for them.
Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
And for what it's worth, flying to many places with a family of four can cost $1200/hour even in economy class.
Race to the bottom?
As someone who used services in the past, I don’t understand why anyone would spend any money at all on those… but they do find clients. Maybe it’s because if I lower my standards I can just easily find someone “for free” instead.
People will pay for convenience and certainty.
Not really, if you are interested in obtaining paid sex you don't have much choice. Most of the brothels are staffed by EE sex workers, been that way for well over a decade. German sex workers are rare in brothels, they work mostly escort and camgirl stuff.
The problem at its core is extreme poverty in EE - not many job opportunities that pay decent wages, so many people from there come to the nearest wealthy country aka Germany. Men go on the construction/agriculture gig job scene, women to prostitution... it doesn't pay much and the conditions both of work and living are extremely bad (just google "Arbeiterstrich München" if you want newspaper reports on the construction gig workers), but even this is better than life in their origin countries. As a result, German workers simply can't afford to work in this environment.
I've always been mildly curious, my first thoughts were "Less than I thought!".
Hear me out (criticism of my thinking on this is very welcome):
In LA's Ktown, a Domi (a job I had no idea existed just a few years ago... google if curious) charges a base rate of $100/hr, plus tips. For the client, there is no guarantee of nudity or any physical contact, though it's of course up to each individual what they're willing to do (and for how much).
From the perspective of the client, $100/hr buys you in-person company in a public setting with someone young, conventionally attractive, dressed skimpily. The person will (pretend to) politely listen to you as you talk, (pretend to) smile, (pretend to) laugh at your jokes, pour drinks for you, (pretend to) agree with your opinions, and, if they choose to, drink with you.
The market supports that price ($100/hr!) for work that does not require ANY sex as requisite. I imagined "entry level" sex work would be priced ~10x (min 7x) over work done (skimpily) clothed and in public, and that, like many other goods and services, "luxury" would have a multiplier over "entry level brand" between 5x and the stratosphere. (I guess with cars it's ~3x.)
These assumptions yield a price of $5k/hr for "luxury brand sex work", ~4x the empirical data. If we assume that "luxury" has a multiplier of just 3x (but I bet it's more!), then the ratio of the market price of sex work over somewhat similar (companionship, paid to be pretty and objectified) work done clothed and in a public venue, in the same city,... can be at most 4x.
Only 4x?
This is what shocks me! :)
Somebody reading this comment (probably making minimum wage) might be thinking 20$ (1200/60) per day food budget is a luxury.
Anyway, all I was wondering is - a super tiny percentage of the population can afford to spend 1200 an hour, on anything. Must be nice to be that rich, lol.
In the past 20 years, I've been nearly homeless, working 2 minimum wage retail jobs 60/h week and cursing the lack of time or energy to improve my situation, and, at another extrema, regularly charged about $1,200/day for my time.
Right now I'm MUCH closer to the former than the later. I can tell you the latter is more fun! ;) But, even then, I'd spend $100/h for a luxury like fine dining, and spending $1000/h for a luxury would have seemed absurd. I imagine if, one made 10x the money, then spending $1000/h for a luxury might make sense?
But, like you said, it must be nice, agreed.
> 8% reported legal trouble
> 8% reported being arrested
> 16% reported physical assault
> 17% reported contracting a STD
> 29% reported being stolen from
> 41% reported sexual assault
So no doubt the rates are in part a reflection of the risks providers take in the course of offering their services.
It is backed up by the author's analytics, though. Perhaps there are valid criticisms about her sampling methodology and the sample size at the very high end, but it's a good start.
I wonder if any money is worth having an extreme risk of getting a deadly virus.
Median income is $100,000/yr. My impression (from HN) is this isn't abnormal for non-entry-level tech workers in the US.
Edit: It's just about the median software engineer salary in the US. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...
Edit2: This previous read "100,000/hr". A transcription mistake.
Disagree. High end work of all sorts isn't the sort of thing you punch in and out of. Both have a high opportunity cost, in that in both cases you'll find it hard to work a similarly compensated second job. Also remember this is only "billable hours".
Edit: I just realized you've completely missed my point. I was replying to a comment the clients (i.e. not the sex workers) are crazy rich. I was presenting an argument for why they aren't.
Note "hour" versus "year".
Do you mean per year?
I'm curious what you think about the relative price comparison to hostess work in LA outlined above. Either you're charging too little, or.. there's some.. interesting implied conclusions about the low relative cost (from the worker's perspective) for sex work! Or there's not enough information liquidity in the market? Or...
I Am Not An Economist, but... I can't shake the feeling there's a mispricing somewhere. Possibly a juicy topic for a paper, blog post, or Planet Money episode.
Also, that gonewild post is genius. Thanks for the laughs.
You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
Also suprised the San Diego price is so high, when there is a red light district literally on the border in Tijuana, and those girls charge $60-$100/hr US to gringos (and less to spanish-speakers, locals, and people who pay in pesos)
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
High-end is basically differentiating yourself from average.
> You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
It's cheap if you are rich and worried about lawsuits, law enforcement, blackmailing, your reputation, etc... Suddenly, $1200/h is quite cheap.
There's depths to it like you can't even imagine.
Sex is a market, and like any market, it has theories that can explain it.
For example: in most places, most of the time, prostitutes charge the same "rate" as wives do, because they're suppliers in competition, and the market sets the price.
Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids. In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
If you step outside of your world for a second and look at it from the outside like an anthropologist might, you'll note that $1200/hour is about right for the "market price" in an nicer part of the world for affluent men. Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
Why?
> You're paying with expensive gifts, trips
Willingly
> you're paying to raise one or more kids
How is that a payment to wife? Those are my kids, it was my decision to make them so now I support them.
> In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
What does paying your social duties has with "payment to your wife"? What, society should raise your offsprings for free?
> Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
Partners are not exclusively for sex, partners are someone you want to spend your life with and, optionally, make kids.
Do you have problems with your wife or smth?
What a strange perspective. In the US at least, having a wife makes you richer, as most women work, and you still live in a one bedroom, so your total income is significantly higher but your costs are only marginally higher. Getting married to another member of the workforce is a great way to build wealth.
She sort of addresses it in the sentence that ends: "...and might be more likely to attract higher power men who are looking to “unlock” something they feel few other people have seen – your nudity."
I guess it's like anything. Things with a higher price feel more exclusive and we desire the things we can't have. If you can afford it, why would you skimp? If it's less affordable - maybe you'd prefer it to feel like an experience (at least in your own head) rather than 'one nut'?!
This is a luxury high-end part of the market. Ruled by the same dynamics as $200 steaks or $2000 bottles of champagne.
No steak is worth $200. But several people up-thread have made the point that $1200 per hour isn't that much, if you consider the alternatives (e.g. getting married - and if you can afford $1200 for a night out, then the divorce is probably going to be very, very expensive).
People will pay for convenience.
Also, if you are the higher paid earner in stable relationship I invite you to tally up the monthly cost sometime.
$1200 an hour, with a minimum 1.5 hours, so $1800. In addition to a 20-minute roll in the hay, you get an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men.
So these "half the people on the planet": if they're not prostitutes, then you will have to date them. You are not going to cop if you take your date out to KFC. Even taking them to a posh restaurant won't guarantee you'll get your end away.
So let's say you manage to get a date 6 nights a week, and you shell-out for a meal and a show ($350 each?). Let's say half of them are people that interest you. Let's say half of those would consider bonking someone on the first date.
So you're out-of-pocket $2100, you've spent three evenings chatting to someone that didn't interest you, and two of the others want more meals and shows (but how many?)
I think my guesses are wild overestimates. I have no idea how one might ever get 6 dates a week. Most women won't bonk you on the first date. Far less than 50% of women are "interesting" (FSVO interesting).
If your time is scarce and valuable, your standards are high, and you have enough money to e.g. take holidays in nice places, then spending a couple of grand on a classy girl for the evening, with a guaranteed payoff, doesn't look insane.
Throwing money at escorts is such a loser move (and the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you) that only someone who's never experienced the latter would seriously argue for paying 1200$ to have 20 minute sex with "an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men."
I'm 65. When I was 18, I was very scruffy, probably smelled bad, and had no money and no car. Women didn't exactly jump at me. I didn't try very hard to persuade them to. And there were no dating apps, and no websites.
I've never been into the "fuckem-and-chuckem" school of romance - I had a few one-nighters with pretty girls. If I was up for paying an escort, I'd pay for a nice one.
> the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you
So you've had the "escort experience"? Odd, then, that you'd say "throwing money at escorts is such a loser move". Maybe you chose badly?
Sounds on the mark to me. I'm extroverted AF, intelligent, can make just about anyone laugh, and can form deep bonds and have deep conversations with people I literally run into off the street. Trying to date in SFO though? Purgatory. I'm not tall - I'm 5'10". I'm not muscular but also not fat - I'm 140lb. I'm a niche good - I don't have the universal appeal of Chris Hemsworth. Therefore, real life is where I'd sell best because I do well in conversation and - unfortunately - that takes so much time. Sooooo much time. The biggest issue is just getting in front of a beautiful woman. Once I'm in front - I can shoot myself in the foot and be okay with it. But, the fact that I can't even get in front of one is the hugest barrier to my lack of dating horror stories to tell friends. It's depressing.
It's the land of 49ers and an escort like Aella sounds appealing to me. I don't know if I'd ever do it for two reasons though. Firstly, I'm a bit too dedicated to a woman's pleasure and I'd worry an escort would be too much in their head to actually enjoy themselves fully. I already have to deal with that with women as it is. I cannot imagine how much in your own head you are as an escort. There was an aspect she touched on in her article that I was thinking myself as I was reading - which is that at least now she gets paid to have mediocre sex. I'm not really into mediocre sex. She did enjoy some but I wonder what it takes for an escort to enjoy it. I've only engaged in sexual acts with women who were obviously very into me (if only for the moment due to some hormones but at least they were into me for that night or two!). I don't doubt her abilities to fake it well but I also think many men are blind, apathetic, or as self-absorbed as many women I've encountered... and I'm not. So I don't think the sex would be good for either of us unless she was into me. Thus, would it be a good experience even if it was free? Probably not. If she was into me then why are we not just dating instead of some paid transaction? I mean if we're dating then she should really be trying to convince me to buy the $3m house like my last partner wanted... $2k transactions are cheap in comparison!
Secondly, the money aspect is very real to me. I might have a couple million in the bank and a 1%er income but the value proposition just is hard for me to reckon with. I think, "$2000+ for a nice night out with a pretty lady who will only see me as long as I keep paying $2k+ for every interaction... or my soft and delicate keyboard warrior hand for the low low price of self-loathing and depression?" For someone who is a comedian in his social circle - it's quite obvious which I'm going for. Self-hatred is just too good to pass up.
Also - 20 minutes? You're with a total babe and you're gonna just spend 20 minutes? What the f. Whenever that kind of opportunity presents itself to me - you have to wheel us both out after.
Most folks here live pretty safe and cushy lives that the majority of humanity doesn’t get to enjoy. Real life for most people requires understanding and defending these things and making conscious decisions to protect them. it doesn’t require someone be doing sex work for it to be that way.
Her strategy of avoiding trouble by keeping price higher even if lower frequency engagements may not be feasible for many, they may be unable to get clients at higher price points and like any biz pressure to generate revenue is immense.
Scenario A: Resourceful, successful, happy. Should she be forced to accept dangerous working conditions and live under the constant threat of eviction, imprisonment, harassment and stigma? Why? What's the argument in favor of making her life difficult?
Scenario B: Physical or mental disability, unattractive, can't afford to refuse clients even though they make her unsafe, doesn't have any other way to pay for rent, food, meds and diapers. Should she be prevented from going to the police when someone beats, rapes or robs her? Should she be prevented from organizing with her friends for mutual protection? Should she be prevented from advertising online and instead forced onto the streets? Again, why? What's the argument in favor of making her life even more difficult?
If an in-house hair dresser was assaulted/robbed/stolen from, they would be able to report it to the police. There would be a strong chance (well as high as any other crime) that it would be punished.
There would also be an opportunity to use/create a verification scheme for clients, but also ask for insurance/tax/qualifications for the hair dresser.
This is what operating in a "decriminalized" world looks like. You don't get harassed by the law, but they wont help you either.
Ideally we would have a world where sex work is legally allowed (so long as its not coerced) and allow those workers to form companies, hire security, use payment systems, have vetting functions. All of the services that would make life much less precarious.
I know that in the people I have encountered in the sex worker world (who are related but not the same as escorts) are very against "legalisation" as they fear it would lead to registers and no chance to limit or control anonymity.
So unless the moral objections are sorted, I don't see any future in these changes.
In the UK, being paid by a pro sex-worker for services in support of that work is a crime called "Living off immoral earnings", and it's treated quite a bit more seriously than prostitution. How do you tell whether the big guy in the car across the street is really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
https://www.inbrief.co.uk/offences/living-off-immoral-earnin...
Modern law has been complicated somewhat by a change in heart. There was an attempt at loosening the rules around prostitution(pre 2009), but they have subsequently been tightened a bit. In short its a mess.
> really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
this is where I diverge from sex workers on my opinion on this. They are pushing for discrimination. But this doesn't solve the coercion/security hired help issue.
The only practical way I can see it going away is by allowing sex workers to be fully legalised, as in form a company, have accounts, pay tax, be inspected by environmental health(or would it be CQC?). have three workers, but only pay tax for one? time for an inspection!
There are risks, and the stigma will force people underground. Holland and germany _still_ have a people trafficking problem
I suspect there are better ways, but unless it sex work can be done on the high street(well not literally), we will never truly over come the stigma, and subsequent exploitation of people.
She has little to no access to state sanctioned violence. Call it what it is. If she has a business dispute she has no recourse, she can't sue the other party and get the state to put them in a cage if they don't pay. Drug industry also has the same problem and does its violence in-house. Formerly prostitution did in-house the violence necessary to settle business disputes (i.e. pimps) but the internet has changed the business model somewhat.
The OP's judgment was that he saw no reason why this escort's business should be illegal. That's not a judgment on whether other forms of prostitution should be legal.
Also it hard from government to legalize only some form of prostitution over others even if politically that is possible, practically impossible to enforce.
Also it's not at all difficult to legalize only some forms of prostitution. Consider this analogous situation: it's hard for a government to legalize only some forms of cutting people with knives, but we seem to do fine legally distinguishing surgery from assault with a deadly weapon.
Otherwise the rest is the same. Most clients are whatever. A few she got to know well and liked. She worked with another person who did screening for her, etc.
Also mean income (as measured by her study of other workers) is $100,000 with her average rates of her sample around 500-600.
Effectively
You cannot control beauty much but you could change for location and optimize for all the factors to get best rate[3]. Or optimize for total money depending on what is preferred.[1] age is strong factor so demographics is a good proxy metric.
Also perhaps friction with law is proxy for cultural acceptance and can be numerically scaled : fully legal, decriminalized, or criminal with quantum of punishment for scaling. And degree of enforcement measured by number of arrests / convictions etc.
[2] probably being 9 in LA wouldnt be the same as say Wyoming( demand would be lesser as a counter pressure)
[3] touring is a thing perhaps because of this.
No, prices are almost standardized, at least in the 'normal' escorting world. I was surprised by this at first. My belief had always been that it'd be super competitive and the hottest girls would charge the highest prices, but it's not like that. Turns out guys don't really care that much about what a girl looks like beyond a baseline level of beauty, which is why so many can get away with hiding their face.
What does matter a lot is what special services are offered (e.g. dominatrix stuff has a different price), and customer retention, which is 100% about whether you're nice and make the guys feel happy. The most successful girls are the ones that develop a loyal customer base. A few men even follow the girls around as they tour, but that's rare. Girls who are cold, uninterested etc don't get repeat custom and exhaust the area quite quickly.
Whether to go high end or not probably depends a lot on how much else you have going on in life. Aella presumably has lots of other projects like OnlyFans, social media etc. This girl was a full timer. It was her job, and she worked pretty long hours (not anymore). She didn't use social media or create websites or whatever. That's normal. Most escorts use ad sites but they aren't creating dedicated websites for themselves. This girl doesn't even use social media at all, not even in her personal life (and never did, and she's not old).
I did ask her once about the high end work but she indicated that at these sorts of prices you could get maybe one client a month, which just wasn't enough to be interesting given she could be making thousands per day reliably by charging a more normal price (a few hundred an hour). And of course with fewer customers you're a lot more exposed to one of them not coming anymore. The people saying "wow $1200/hr is a lot" are right, I suspect only in Silicon Valley are there a large enough percentage of über-rich but unlucky-with-women people to pay those sorts of rates. Most guys visited her around payday, it was a very cyclical business.
If you do ever get to know an escort on a personal level, or especially more than one, be aware that this is a world that will seem - to the average office worker at least - astoundingly racist. It's touched on in the article but is something else that surprised me a lot. All the girls have strong opinions about different races and a large number demand to know a client's race before they turn up and will simply refuse clients of particular races. There is no stigma or shame associated with such discussions or policies. In escorting there are no HR departments to tell people what to think, 'diversity' isn't a thing, they're all independent or at most work with one or two other girls who are just like them. Learning about this made me reflect a lot on to what extent the middle class office/tech world obsession with anti-racism is a function of the heavy level of filtering that goes on at the front door as part of selecting for skills, university, background etc. The belief that everyone is culturally homogenous and race is just a pigment, just doesn't fly amongst escorts. They learn to generalize about their client base very quickly. To them the link between race and culture is both real and of critical importance.
I am surprised that saturation can happen in 2 weeks. Unless I am completely clueless about this, that is probably maybe 20-25 appointments (having more than sex 3-4 times a day especially professionally(she seemed to do most of the work) must be incredibility exhausting ). Even if more was possible I can't manage to schedule more than 3 external work meetings a day that is not video conference, scheduling definitely must be more challenging than that here.
It seems pretty small pool if saturated after only 20-25? Perhaps the screening process or narrow advertising ability ( only few platforms allow/ expensive) limiting the reach or competition is pretty heavy at this price point perhaps.
What you are describing regarding race is they find putting race a filtering criteria helps keep screening easier (Somewhat analogous to companies only hiring from tier-1 universities etc ). Better screening leads to better results in hiring rather than arbitrary criteria, I can attest to this in hiring, perhaps it applies here as well but it usually cheaper /easier to implement criteria than screen candidates better for companies. If institutional resources don't do it well, independent workers can hardly be expected to do better. I don't think anything is wrong in sex workers applying race or any type of criteria, it is risky and vulnerable business without any legal or social support, they have to err on the side of caution if they can.
I am not sure there has been exploration of the emotional stress and challenges for the client too. Imagine being rejected often(race or not) even when you are ready to pay for sex on top being unable to attract partners normally that would be quite hard to accept for anyone.
Also the amount of personal information clients are expected to share and references they need to have (while I understand why it is being asked) is pretty steep. There are so many vectors this information may leak from and could damage your life/marriage, lead to arrests etc. That has got to be stressful too.. I would be totally paranoid towards sharing any PII, I guess a good chunk of rich men in the valley would also hesitate on that.
So within two weeks (working 6-7 days per week) it's easy to pack in like 80 different punters and there's a limited supply in most towns. Most men aren't visiting, and there are plenty of other girls competing for the business. In a big city sure you can't saturate it but there's also correspondingly much more competition and the police are more active, so some of them prefer to avoid the cities and stick to the smaller conurbations.
Most men don't share any PII. They pay in cash and may or may not use their real names. If they get "banned" it's the phone number that gets banned.
My understanding was cash is more because tax or no service from formal banking, not directly to hide identity
I guess the government's objective is to kill the business completely, which is about as realistic as prohibiting alcohol.
This increases competition of sex workers for johns, artificially drives prices down, gives johns greater bargaining power over sex workers, and doesn’t fix the problem of johns trying hard to remain anonymous and requiring situations where you’re less able to go to the police if you wanted. Sex workers hate this.
I don't have an opinion(or data) on whether this is effective or is good approach or not, just wanted point out that it is less about driving demand down, they are not trying to criminalize johns(it already was) but trying to address issues on the workers side perhaps ineffectively.
The law is supposedly there to protect the sex workers, but you don't do that by forcing into hiding and making it unlikely that any crimes against them will be reported by anyone else.
If they really cared about the sex workers they would instead make it easy for them to get anonymous support with health, in particular mental health, and drug abuse problems. And institute a hotline for sex buyers to call without risk getting into any legal troubles if they suspect that a sex worker needs any help for whatever reason.
It is extremely hard to differentiate who is involuntary legally even if there was strong provisions for it and sex workers mostly can not pay for expensive legal counsel who can make that case.
Nordic laws are an attempt to not decriminalize sex work at the same time not punish the workers at all.
It is not about controlling demand over supply
[1] https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K6P12S2
All your caveats upfront on the quality of sampling is more than I have seen in many academic papers.
I don't have experience either as service provider or client to give a professionally informed comment here.
However having said that, sex work in general (even only in the United States) starts at lot less than 200-300$/hour in the lower end of the your study[2]. It is a great study and amazing subject testimony but it does only cover mid to high end of the spectrum.
As a basis for policy making covering the lower end of the spectrum and cover specifc policy issues and also cover other stakeholders like healthcare, law enforcement, welfare etc would be important.
I am sure there are lot more qualified people than me you are already in touch/working with, however I am happy to offer my help with statistics or code or lit review and publish formally /research proposal if you wish to go down that route.
[1] Your content, there are some parallels with how startups publish quality industry reports as a brand recognition strategy that I found very interesting.
[2] you have indicated the limitations in many places quite clearly am not finding faulting with your study .
Marginalized workers in the cannabis industry got pushed out when Canada legalized cannabis.
What is a marginalized worker in the cannabis sector?
If I want drugs, I buy the drugs the dealer is pushing.
In a legal market for sex, a customer can be more selective, so the less desired workers will lose customers.
When weed was legalized the bottom rung of the weed dealers, lost their market to stores who suddenly offered a better option to consumers.
Marginalization in the cannabis dealer scene would be poor people who sell a bit of weed to make ends meet or cheap/free weed in exchange for dealing.
Legal stores are employing people legitimately and paying taxes, so I don't mind if some dealers now have to quit or diversify. The more jobs we have in legal drugs the fewer required in the illegal drug trade. This is a net positive to society.
Whenever I think about consumer electronics, I think they are turning into status symbols more than tools providing utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.
But I must say that this escort is super smart and has a really good sense of business. This article also gave me some newfound respect for escorts for the fact that although on the surface they seem to mostly just use their bodies, they do put in a lot of effort on the business and strategy side which people don't talk about.
I hope you hate capitalism then. It's all about supply and demand. As a gay man with some friends who escort, their rates are much lower, both for obvious reasons (it is ridiculously easy for most gay men to find other men to have sex with) and less obvious ones (IMO there is much less of a stigma among gay men for escorting, and at least friends I knew who did it expressed little shame at doing it).
I'm thinking that if men and women of equally poor background, women have this escort option that men don't (obviously they do, but it pays far less good on average than women).
I mean, anchoring your price high, to better capture the businessman/enterprise market? And that this market also happens to be less likely to be time-suck jerks about little issues, or constantly asking for product changes/features? Literally better b̶a̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶buck for your bang.
And it’s right out of the classic @patio11 essays, too. Charge more, indeed.
"I’ve had many clients that I remember fondly and who mean a lot to me. One client I would regularly hold in close skin-to-skin contact as he cried, and I cried with him; another was young and vibrant and too big for the small world around him. Another was a quadriplegic, and yet another was a talented writer who valued rarely seen things in me and encouraged me to do great things without ever once implying escorting was beneath me. Another whose wife had recently died and found me as his first foray into being with another woman, because he couldn’t bear to fully date another person yet. I’ve had clients figure out who I am and show up asking me to tripsit them on psychedelics, wildly successful CEOs who treated me as an intellectual equal, or people who were dying of cancer and didn’t want to go out without another bang (I recently looked up one of my favorite clients and instead found his obituary)."
After being shocked at how low the price is, considering how the market prices a related job (see my other comment for details), the second thought I had is that there might be some interesting low MRR startupish product opportunities.
Holy shit, why do ppl pay this? Honestly wondering. Cant most people just go hook up at a bar or smth if they're that desperate?
I’d say that most important is that she was SUPER thoughtful about the experience she provided to her clients. Things like identifying non-latex condoms to avoid allergies, wearing a short necklace so it won’t slap him in the face.
Whenever I pay more for something and am glad I did, it’s almost always because I am impressed by the attention to detail. Then again, maybe that’s because I, too, pay attention to detail.
Most people can "just go hook up" at a bar or whatever, but then again, most people don't pay for escorts. Some people can't "just go hook up", though, and I would assume those people form a significant part of escorts' client base (the author described these as inexperienced young people). The author also described other motivations, like busy rich people, and people wanting to cheat on their partners.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ (first post, later ones linked from the top)
But perhaps most importantly, I think we all know (right?) that the title Software Engineer is not, in practice, currently imparted consistently with how much “real” engineering is being applied.
https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncees-en...
There is no certifing body (in most countries) on who can call themselves engineers unlike doctors or lawyers.
So it is really up to you , whether you see what you do as engineering (not only with software) or not
This is from a group of sex workers who appear to be screening their clientele. I wonder how high the number would be among sex workers who don't have the same amount of financial safety net that someone who can pick and chose their clients has.
I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place. I always hear how sex work just needs to be regulated and everything would be fine, but how does one prosecute something that happens in a private setting, behind closed doors?
"Something is either morally wrong or it isn't, it can't be slightly morally wrong" Therein lies the difficulty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIYfiRyPi3o
Yes, let's make men who want to pay for sex watch an hour-long video extolling the virtues of "real" relationships.
The reality is that there are a lot of men who enter into "normal" relationships with women in large part because it gives them easier access to sex. Not all of them are happy. Lots of them overextend themselves financially, and generally do things they wouldn't otherwise do, to keep their girlfriends satisfied.
These are less direct exchanges, but they are exchanges nonetheless.
I'm living in East Asia, which has made me think more about the exchanges that take place in relationships between men and women. Here, it's common to see men with expressionless looks on their faces lugging their girlfriends' handbags, spending 20 minutes helping them take cutesy photos, pushing strollers carrying not children but tiny, professionally-groomed pups, etc.
As a warm-blooded man, you'd have a hard time convincing me that access to sex isn't a big reason these men are putting up with this stuff. Why do men who pay for sex need a diversion mechanism but the men who totally lose themselves in a relationship don't?
What happens if the men who pay directly for sex report shorter relationships and have lifespans 6 months shorter than men who don't, but they tell you they're happier? Or what happens if you discover that men who pay for sex while in relationships report longer relationships?
Philosophically I am wary of the coercive power of money in relationships. The economy is misunderstood enough, I can't imagine the situation is better when it comes to intimacy markets. Can I coin the phrase Psychological economics?
I see parasocial relationships as something like a new virus that the human psyche has no immunity towards. People naturally think in emotional rather than transactional terms.
Also, the relationship between an escort and a client is absolutely not a "parasocial relationship." You're abusing that term. Escorts and their clients have real relationships, even if you have a problem with the fact that they're based on transactional intimacy.
Universal basic income
And to elaborate on the prosecution part, in the wake of #MeToo, a lot of people came out with their stories, but not many of them pursued a legal route. I got the feeling that proving many of those allegations would be difficult in a legal system and whatever cases that did go through the legal system had a preponderance of evidence - along with immense social pressure - backing them up (think Bill Cosby/Harvery Weinstein). This is what made me wonder how much of a deterrent decriminalization/regulation would be on sexual assaults. Do we have to use public shaming, like in #MeToo, as a deterrent mechanism?
> I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place.
I doubt we would ever get it down to the background rate, but having a high base rate means there is a lot of room for improvement.
Just legalizing it would probably help. Having an above ground would likely improve the quality the background check network, and would increase the accessibility of information on how to be a sex worker with relative safety.
Beyond that, the potential to have a good relationship with police would probably be a big help. I doubt it would see much actual use (who wants to risk a reputation of getting their clients arrested), however at least some people would be more careful if they thought there was a chance that the sex worker could report them.
There is also the option of proper brothels, with panic buttons and bouncers listening in for screams.
We prosecute tons of things that happen between closed doors, already... Including sexual assault.
Regardless of whether prostitution should be legalized on liberal grounds, it is not prosocial behavior and it is unfortunate that the taboo against it seems to be decaying.
Live theater, concerts, and therapy are all purchased experiences, too, and they can all be pretty powerful experiences on either side of the transaction. I don't see why escorting that includes conversation would be any different.
I have several female friends who are escorts, or rather "providers", and the term most frequently used for the men (as OP said) is "hobbyists". However, they don't really see "hobbyist" as derogatory as OP claims. Which is interesting.
I'm saddened that she describes such a solo experience. There is (was before COVID) a weekly meetup at a local restaurant where the providers got to know each other and swap stories. There was a back channel network where they could blacklist individuals. It was a cohesive group that looked out for each other. They even had presentations on how to launder money through Etsy. As OP said, the IRS will notice!
In addition, some women jumped in for a short period, but some stick around. One friend have been at it for over 15 years: there long-term relationships are pretty amazing to hear about. We dated and I would sometimes get de-identified summaries of fetishes.
There are "old timers" in this profession just like programming. This OP is like a ReactJS dev talking to CGI-BIN devs. I use this analogy becuase one of my friends worked mostly with programmers and went by "RubyGetsRailed" online.
EDIT: I hope I'm not mansplaining, but it is a diverse community that exists everywhere and I wanted to share the variations I've encountered.
Un-stigmatize sex work.
This felt informative, thanks
I think it's important to highlight the diversity of sex work. This one passage caught my attention:
> SeekingArrangement – This website, unlike the above, professes to definitely not allow escorts, and makes it difficult to be explicit about it. Most men connecting through the website anticipate paying around 50-70% less, as women tend to be willing to accept less money if you give them a veneer of not being a real sex worker. You can still attempt to do clear sex work here though – “PPM”, or pay-per-meet, indicates that you want to be paid per meeting, and this is the way to start out the discussion. Seeking Arrangement also had the lowest correlation with arrests,
Nearly all of my experience with sex work (as a client) is off Seeking Arrangment. For those unfamiliar it's a site for people to engage in "sugar dating", where a "sugar daddy" compensates a "sugar baby" to spend time with him, ostensibly unconnected to any expectations of sex. I find these terms cringeworthy, I'll call it compensated dating. In practice there's almost always expectations of sex. There's definitely a sizeable overlap between SA and traditional escorting sites, browse both and you'll come across the same profiles with moderate frequency. But in general, "sugar dating" involves a sizeable chunk of activities beyond having sex. It's expected to take dates out to dinner, movies, and other activities one would normally do on dates.
I think Aella is being a bit snide when she calls this "the veneer of not being a real sex worker". Almost all of the people I met considered it sex work and weren't under any illusion about the fact that money was changing hands in exchange for sex. When I asked why they preferred compensated dating rather than escorting the reasons were primarily twofold:
* Safety. It's not uncommon for people to meet in person once or twice before agreeing to meet for sex. These initial meetings are almost always in public or semi-public places (restaurants, bars, parks, malls). Most people give each other real names after meeting in person. I suppose this could also reduce safety, but there's a M.A.D. element of this that seems to work.
* Sense of connection, quality of experience. Many of the women on SA that I met spoke negatively of instances where men only saw them for an hour to have sex and didn't want to spend time together outside of the bedroom. Do they really just care about "the veneer of not being a sex worker"? Maybe, but I get the sense that many genuinely have a more enjoyable experience - or at least more tolerable experience - meeting someone few times platonically before having sex.
Speaking from the male perspective here, I'm really not sure why someone would prefer escorting over compensated dating. Aella is right that it's 50-70% less expensive. Maybe a bit less if one factors in cost of meals and activities. But $/hr of time spent together is easily 4-5x less than escorting. Personally I'm the type that sees the expectation of spending time together outside of the bedroom as a positive rather than a negative, so it's a win on both counts. Between $1200 for 90 minutes with someone and $400-700 in exchange for having dinner with someone, sex, taking a bath together and talking, and spending the night together the latter is way preferable.
The only potential negative is possibly the overlap of sugar dating and real relationships. I know both men and women who have moved in with, and in one instance gotten married to, people they met off SA. The one negative experience I had was with someone who wanted to have a real relationship and I did not, leading to a falling out and stuff being said about me - fortunately nothing that actual led to significant repercussions.
The ethical calculus appears to be more complicated than the straightforward 2 consenting adults engaged in a victimless crime.
Consider the current rates of single mothers, the increasing trends of broken homes and higher divorce rates, one is forced to really examine what is under the belly of this beast.
Is there causality, or not?
Do kids pay the price from easier access to family breakups? Do these side deals even lead to breakups at all, or were they just serve to speed up the inevitable ?
I would like to understand if there is a way to estimate the impact of any broad change in policy.
Thing do bode well in one respect: AFAIK, decriminalizing marijuana in portugal led to less drug abuse.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has-hit-a-50-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTmLd5PTyc