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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."
Call a "switchboard operator"? "patched through" to your desk? What is this, 1946? The mid/highclass hookers aren't asking their customers for identification. Who writes this garbage?
Count me in. Selling sex makes good money, but I bet you could make even more with blackmail!
The "HughPickens.com writes" should be enough warning for everyone.
I'm sure there is a real story on this topic which is interesting on many levels but this isn't it.
So many things about this make it look like back of the envelope scrawling in a bar just before deadline.
File it with all the "toothing" casual sex hookups that were a media thing but never appeared to have actually happened as written.
I didn't get past the summary which for me is rare. It's like some weird Penthouse Forum story, written by a person who is completely oblivious to reality and no experience or knowledge of prostitution. I mean, they could have paid a real prostitute money to interview them, but instead they just made shit up. Really stupid shit at that.
Usually there is a purpose for this kind of trash, but in this case I'm really stumped. Maybe they think they will normalize people giving hookers info by making elaborately false claims?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
One thing I've learned in life is that guys who call it "smash some puss", very rarely get to smash any puss.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So does this mean anyone who has a pee fetish is unworthy of respect? What other sexual practices disqualify one from having dignity - anything except missionary position for the sole purpose of procreation with the lights off?
Or is the real issue here that, after the piss goes on them, they take a shower and get on with their lives, having suffered no actual harm whatsoever, and that insults your sense of propriety?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.