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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."
The joke's on you, many of them are paid handsomely for exactly that.
Who the fuck in their right mind would give any personal info to a hooker?
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.
COMPLETELY made up. Nobody would consent to this for an hooker, even a mid/high-class one - which these ain't. Kink, dominatrix services, etc. are pretty easily available if you have cash to spend. Keep in mind that the very next article after this garbage on this site has a title that says, "You realize Pokémon is basically animal cruelty, right?". Dreamed up, 50 shades of gray, hipster feminist garbage.
It is degrading and dangerous.
Prostitution is degrading and dangerous because our laws and institutions have made it that way. It isn't like that everywhere. Many other countries have legalized prostitution, which is safer for both hookers and johns. Less violence, less coercion, less disease, less social decay.
Why wouldn't you? I give personal information to all sorts of people for business reasons. I see no evidence that sex workers are more or less untrustworthy than any other trade. Maybe some are controlled by criminal gangs that would then exploit the details, but that's true of some garages, used car dealerships, nightclubs and restaurants, too.
Blackmail? The garage isn't going to threaten to rat you out to your wife unless you pay more. The restaurant is not going to make money by threatening to tell details of your meal to your children. The garage can't extort money out of you by revealing that you had your car fixed by them.
I can't imagine any john stupid enough to give a hooker their real name, much less verify their employer!
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.