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

Enough with sexual exploitation

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough with sexual exploitation of men. These cunts hardly worth the money they are asking.

If you want to know who exploit who, look at the direction money take. Stop being a feminist apologist.

Re:Bullshit

[ag0ny]

Wow, those fake tits are disgusting. I wonder what kind of loser pays girls like these.

Re: Bullshit

[angel'o'sphere]

I have no idea about Rita ... which is probably a fictional character.

I simply say that a high class escort lady has no reason to do anything of what the parent claimed.

There is a difference between a "hooker" and a high class escort worker.

If you don't see that, it is your problem.

Face it, no one in their right mind would want a traceable record of their visit to a prostitute.
Which is quite impossible to avoid when you use a "call girl" and don't pick up a "hooker" from the street.