The New Prostitution Economy
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
In this article, young people appear to have either large debt or expensive taste. They're encouraged to attend college, but increasingly find that the available jobs don't meet expectations. "Vanilla", low-paying employment.
The description of the young woman who learned how to present herself and even how to do an elevator pitch sound like the exception, rather than the norm. Not everyone is so ambitious. Instead, the article suggests that most young people start doing this out of desperation.
Desperation for paying off increasing debt, desperation for not having been taught or learned the skills necessary to have a non-vanilla, well-paying job, desperation for not being able to have the life that seems so accessible online today but only available to a few.
I have had multiple friends seriously consider this line of work, and some undertake it. No one talks about it. It's very secretive, and somewhat dangerous. It's not talked about with girlfriends at bars. It's not told to mom and dad, but it is all around you.
I once had one of these friends approach mose to ask if she could invest in my startup in cash because she had garbage bags of cash that she could no longer legally deposit in her bank. That cash put her through college.
Many of their clients do have significant others, and many of those significant others know what's going on. It's just "fun on the side". When this article says "tech guys" it doesn't mean senior developers; it means twenty-something VPs and CTOs.
Exactly. Funny how the phrase "tech guys" has morphed from programmers and hackers (1990s) into VPs and senior execs (2010s). No programmers I know are able to afford to spend $700/hr on anything, let alone something you can get for free.
What is interesting and scary at the same time is what happens to relationships and sexuality if all of a sudden anyone on both sides of the pay for dating->sex equation can find what they're looking for? Does it make it everyone more callous about sex knowing that it is a commodity with a free market? Does it increase infidelity? Will it make people more accepting of and open about sex? Does it create more angry and sexually-frustrated males feeling like they're beaten out by people who can pay?
With the sugar daddy phenomenon it could create a source of modest wealth for a some of these women. In several of these exposes some of the women were using their sugar daddies to fund their business ideas or to pay for higher education. And really, it's not prostitution in the legal sense.
I think there'll be a lot of surprising outcomes from this, some of the good, some of them bad.
Quotes that are too perfect, stereotypes that are too stereotypical, plus a generous helping of "everyone is" quotes.
Mind you, accusing a journalist of outright fabrication is very serious.
What's more likely is that she was able to selectively form a narrative. Note the total absence of independent statistics. No interviews with police, independent researchers, other journalists, sociologists, economists. No quotes from people who break the narrative, creating a total absence of any alternative storyline.
Perhaps it was the 'jumbo-sized Danny DeVito's' that kinda broke the suspense of disbelief.
That was my thought too, I found this story to be really depressing.
But I feel like the author is trying to present this as a general and wide-adopted trend when it's probably quite marginal.
The point is that there's a difference between regular labor and sex.
It's about stating a difference because sex work being seen a mainstream practice is arguably not a good thing. (be it legal or not, that's not related here)
But whatever, clearly there's a group of people here on HN who are taking the hard line "sex work is just labor" position and there's not going to be a rational discussion here.
Losing 10% of your net worth and losing 90% of your net worth are both traumatic. One is more so because it's to a larger degree, but it's not an entirely different thing, it's just a different amount. That's why we have different punishments for petty theft and grand larceny. Not because they're completely different crimes, but because they're different degrees of the same crime.
It's also different from other (consensual or non-consensual) activities because it's sex; the same way that it's different from playing frisbee or (relating to the sibling comment) fixing a car; let's call this the dimension of intimacy.
So in binary terms, we have four quadrants, with prototypical examples of playing frisbee (non-coerced, non-intimate), forcing someone to fix a car (coerced, non-intimate), prostitution (non-coerced, intimate), rape (coerced, intimate).
I hasten to add that prostitution is often, in fact, very clearly coerced (by threat of violence), and of course there's an argument to be made that many other instances are also coerced (by threat of poverty).
Edit: Re-reading my comment, calling it misleading and bizzare seems unkind, I apologize. Thinking in terms of these two dimension is (I think) helpful, but it's also an arbitrary choice. When you choose other (or fewer) "variables", the point made in the article follows.
Someone purposely pushing someone over a cliff is not the same as someone running out of water in the middle of a trek across a desert because the oasis they expected had run dry.
This is not to say that I am completely comfortable with this thing, though. For someone like myself, this Sugar-daddy-baby thing feels like a 180 degree departure from the values that I grew up with, which society itself promoted as the right thing. Now I just feel lost and alone. Everything is depressingly transactional. In all honesty, I'm quite comfortable with that when it comes to most of my daily interactions. But when it comes to relationships, I feel shocked. Maybe I'm a hypocrite.
Or maybe she's tired of dating in general. Might as well get paid for it then.
I agree. I'm curious what that quality is specifically. Both for my own personal advancement and out of a general belief that people are individuals not the labels that they are described by. I would think certainly there's both a subset of "frat bros" and tech workers that these women might find fulfilling long-term relationships with.
I mean, if it was something special about sex, we wouldn't need to qualify it as sexual (prostitution is not 'sexual prostitution' or even 'sexual slavery').
So what is it that is the problem with sexual objectification? It's not the objectification proper since nobody is lamenting the objectification of plumbers and painters or what not. And it's not like anybody cares about what their feelings are like. Everyone seems to understand that it's a job.
So really, the aspect of sexual objectification people don't like is that they believe no one should be allowed to sell sex. And my question is why? We sure are allowed to sell food, either at the grocery or the restaurant. We're are allowed to sell and rent living arrangements. Although it's uncommon, there's even places charging for access to toilets.
So why is sex so special?
If only Rusty would have restored kuro5hin.org by now, I would link to my diary titled "The difference between boys & girls"...
'Evolution' has decided that women get to choose who they have sex with. Women have to be picky, men tend to take what they can get. Some women are much more open to sex than others. Some women factor monetary considerations into their decision process.
I once picked a woman up in the taxi from a cheap motel, and took her south along I-17. When we drove past Cheetah's (a strip club), my passenger said, "I've bet you've picked up a lot of ho's there." I protested that strippers were just working. She'd had a lot more experience with strip clubs than I, and she said something like "all strippers are ho's". Which I guess might be true enough to be a truism.
I also had a stripper who'd been followed home and beaten up by some of the clubs' patrons, probably because she wasn't available for the services they wanted. (Edit: I had this woman a couple times. Sometimes she arranged for me to pick her up again for her trip home, instead of calling the taxi company for a random driver.)
Everything about this screams "Bullshit marketing/PR piece". Is it only me?
It reminds me of those "Don't buy <popular nutraceutical> until you read this" advertorials, which purportedly offer a critical look, but are actually written by the nutraceutical company.
I've flagged the post. I recommend you do the same.
This sort of magazines are just a channel to present products and to imprint the fear of being an outcast into people, in case they don't prostitute themselves for a product-brand. Of course it's bullshit marketing piece!
At the same time, the "everybody is doing it angle" is basically true, especially in the cities with lots of attractive girls (LA, NYC, Miami, etc). My gay friends who sponsor younger dudes confirm the same on that side.
If these women are truly able to charge hundreds of dollars for their time, I'm thinking this is way more of a niche activity than the author's implying.
If social attitudes change, and tech lends a hand by making it easier and discreet, I don't see why the same dynamic wouldn't continue.
I'm sure prices will be driven down as stuff like this becomes more accepted but I doubt it will be driven down to subsistence levels. Sex work is not for everyone, even if it is more socially acceptable.
We like to answer with "basic income" or "we'll create new jobs", but that's not always the case.
Uberization of prostitution, surrogacy, professional cuddlers. That should open our eyes.
P.S. This sure feels like a PR piece: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
PS2: The article has lots of ads for luxury goods while describing women using prostitution to buy these products: "She became a sugar baby in order to buy luxury goods." I can't figure out if that is terrible ad placement or genius ad placement. And there's a strange circularity where the article creates demand for luxury goods (and sex), while simultaneously providing a solution for how to obtain the luxury goods (and sex).
To try and ban such behavior is immoral. Look at the fruits of prohibition:
1. Prostitutes can not rely on the police for protection. This leads many women who practice this to be under the "administration" of a pimp.
2. Because it is illegal, criminals are the ones who engage in the activity. With little respect for the rule of law, other laws are ignored such as age of consent, kidnapping, coercion, etc. This leads to literal human trafficking.
When I read comments about a lack of "reasonable regulatory framework", I cringe. So what would this look like? A "reasonable" approach would be to have all sex workers and their customers tested for STDs. How do we enforce that? You get a certificate from a regulatory agency? How do we prevent that system from being corrupted? How often should one get tested? Would the burden and costs exceed that of engaging in "illegal" prostitution? There are lag times from when STD is detectable and transmissible. It is not possible, even within a regulatory framework, to prevent the transmission of STDs.
I much prefer a technological solution. If prostitution was legal, the need to be informed about your clients would be addressed by competing interests. We don't need a government agency telling us how to engage in the oldest and most ancient of professions!
There's definitely a place for morality, but perhaps a better way to put it is that there should be no place for any non-utilitarian morality in any legal framework.
> "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater" IMO, this is obviously true. Why wouldn't it be the real reason?
Yes, that really is the reason it is wrong. Men aren't utility monsters, the existence (even hypothetically) of utility monsters is doubtful, and it is harmful to optimize a system of morality for situations that have an infinitismal probability of being realized.
Like the fact certain types can be used to basically justify anything the majority likes, regardless of whether it's really fair on anyone else. You could argue banning various social and religious views is acceptable as a utilitarian, so long as the majority of the population would be happier with them banned.
is that something you actually support, or am I misinterpreting?
Morality: principles concerning the distinction between
right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
But non-violent crimes, then, or those that don't violate property or privacy? Who says you have a right to either of those? On what basis do they justify that position?
Morality and ethics are the very basis of legal frameworks. The question is, what do we consider moral/ethical and what is worth criminal/civil punishment versus social ostracization.
Ethics is a set of rules about what one person can do to another person. Is this act harmful to another person?
Morality is a set of rules about what a person can do to their own self. Is this act harmful to me?
All moral questions.
I flinched when saw this headline, then cringed when I realized it wasn't just a terribly inappropriate reference to the "gig economy".
I wish we could restrict discussion about sex work to those who have been involved in it, or at least ensure their voices are included.
But I know this doesn't belong on hacker news. There's no tech, there's no engineering impact, and it's a dangerous topic given the delicacy of gender issues in a startup culture context.
Those are not the criteria for whether something belongs on Hacker News. The criterion is simply that a story be intellectually interesting.
This one is complex in that it has intellectually interesting aspects as well as other aspects. But that's not uncommon.
Obvious Jane says: no, but I'm also not expected to screw them.
Historically, it looks like the prostitution ban was mostly pushed through by this women's organization. They also did Prohibition, and this all happened around the same time women got the right to vote and WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman%27s_Christian_Temperance...
I'm not sure how many of the historical reasons still apply: We're not in any serious war, zoning laws and city codes seem like they'd be sufficient to protect against slimy neighborhoods, there's been a 'safe sex' movement so it'd be less likely that people would freely transmit diseases, and abusive pimps don't seem as economically necessary.
Also, what's up with the VC that let a prostitute run up $60k on the tab. At no level of wealth are you ever "too busy" to watch your money, and this guy's job is to manage money.
Interestingly, too, women on the whole used to vote more politically conservative than men, while today they vote more politically liberal than men: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21700425-europes-far-ri....
https://www.ted.com/talks/toni_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers...
Hmmmm...