Slashdot Mirror
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."
As the saying goes - you're not paying for sex, you're paying for her to go away afterwards.
I have a friend who is (was) a sex worker for a time. Being the curious sort, I asked her about the work, and what sort of guys she saw. There were, obviously, the creeps (the ones who kept trying to push boundaries, or tried to steal shit, or were just fucking weird.) Many of the guys, however, she said fell into a few categories:
1) Married / in a relationship, but sexually unhappy - the prostitute was a low-risk way of getting their dick tickled in the way they liked without having to worry about a crazy one-night stand coming back to haunt them;
2) Busy, and unable to pursue a regular relationship, so used the prostitute to satisfy the urge for a little contact & intimacy when they needed it;
3) "not traditionally great looking" (i.e., fat, old), and used the prostitute in much the same way as group #2 above;
Admittedly, this sample size is likely too small to be anything more than anecdotal evidence, but she said the majority of the guys she saw were relatively "normal" seeming guys.