How The Internet Helps Sex Workers Keep Customers Honest (qz.com)

HughPickens.com writes: Mid-range prostitution is a relatively new market, enabled by technology. Before the internet, it was hard for escorts to find customers: They had to either walk the streets searching for customers, rely on word-of-mouth, or work with agencies. The internet changed all that as Allison Schrager writes at Quartz that if you work at Goldman Sachs in NYC and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her, you'll first have to talk to Rita. Rita will "insist on calling your office, speaking to the switchboard operator, and being patched through to your desk. Then she will want to check out your profile on the company website and LinkedIn. She'll demand you send her message from your work email, and require a scan of either your passport or driver's license." Though some escorts rely on sex work-specific sites that maintain "bad date" lists of potentially dangerous clients, others make use of more mainstream sources to gather information about and verify the identities of potential johns. Rita is addressing a problem that every business, both legal and illegal, has. Before the internet, more commerce occurred locally -- customers knew their merchants or service providers and went back to them repeatedly. As technology has expanded our transactional networks, it must also offer new ways of building trust and reputation. "The lesson here is that, while you'd think all the technological options for finding customers would make Rita's job as a madam obsolete, it has actually made her services more critical," says Schrager. "One step ahead of the mainstream economy, Rita's thriving business shows that some jobs won't disappear. They just need to be recast in a way that capitalizes on what made them valuable in the first place."

Comments

Re: Also for blackmailing them

[cunina]

The joke's on you, many of them are paid handsomely for exactly that.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAH oh how little you know

Yes, you most certainly CAN order a prostitute from overseas on the Internet. Or anywhere you want. It'll cost you, but the higher priced ones, oh yes they do indeed travel. Look up Christine McQueen for an example

EDITORS: RTFA

[fred911]

Hughpickens writes

"and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her, you'll first have to talk to Rita."

The article actually reads:

"you want to be tied up by a woman and then have sex with her"

I don't know but I think we're talking about different specialists here aren't we?

The /. summary and the article differ.

[Rip!ey]

The /. summary says "... if you work at Goldman Sachs in NYC and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her ..."

The linked article says "... If you work at Goldman Sachs in a major US city and you want to be tied up by a woman and then have sex with her ..."

That's a substantial difference. Who changed what, and when? Is that poor /. editing?