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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?
The joke's on you, many of them are paid handsomely for exactly that.
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.
Is this the best you can find to post on slashdot, the technology site?
If I did, it would be my impression of you.
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?
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Rita's job is not obsolete but what she does can fairly easily be replicated with a script.
You can't handle the truth.
Why am I reading this? What happened to my life?
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 ..."
..."
/. editing?
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
...you don't work at Goldman Sachs?
Other people have debunked your numbers but something not debunked is the notion that all sex service are trafficking. Women being trafficked are actually a rainy minority of those selling sexual services (which ranges form escort to stripper to everything in between).
Being able to use your body as you see fit, including making money, is not a "man's dream" - it is the dream of humanity. If an athlete or model can make money from their body why not a sex worker (and remember we are not just talking women here, but men/women/other)? Just because YOU don't like it? Why should your views be forced on all the women of the world? In the end you are simply a misogynist pretending to care.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now they are eyeball deep in the looting scandal that stole over $2.5 billion dollars out of the Malaysian economy.
So no matter how much fun it is for Wall Street types to tie up hookers, or be tied up by them, nothing comes close to egomaniac thrill of wrecking entire economies for profit. That's why they keep doing it over and over again.
BTW, one of the truly ironic features of this case is that some of the stolen money was used to fund the film The Wolf of Wall Street. You can't make this kind of shit up.
Why is Snark Required?
"Would you marry an orange Oompa Loompa who had a billion dollars?"
"Of course, dahlink"
"Would you marry an orange Oompa Loompa who was broke?"
"Vat do you take me for?"
"We've already established that, now we're just negotiating."
[The Art of the Deal]
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
One thing I've learned in life is that guys who call it "smash some puss", very rarely get to smash any puss.
Yep. I was going to say that this guy sounds like a real smooth player, but then I started laughing and couldn't stop.
"Smash some puss" indeed, this is the mark of a loser who's probably never seen an actual woman naked.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
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.