Overly analytical guide to escorting
knowingless.com
knowingless.com
I mean, anchoring your price high, to better capture the businessman/enterprise market? And that this market also happens to be less likely to be time-suck jerks about little issues, or constantly asking for product changes/features? Literally better b̶a̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶buck for your bang.
And it’s right out of the classic @patio11 essays, too. Charge more, indeed.
"I’ve had many clients that I remember fondly and who mean a lot to me. One client I would regularly hold in close skin-to-skin contact as he cried, and I cried with him; another was young and vibrant and too big for the small world around him. Another was a quadriplegic, and yet another was a talented writer who valued rarely seen things in me and encouraged me to do great things without ever once implying escorting was beneath me. Another whose wife had recently died and found me as his first foray into being with another woman, because he couldn’t bear to fully date another person yet. I’ve had clients figure out who I am and show up asking me to tripsit them on psychedelics, wildly successful CEOs who treated me as an intellectual equal, or people who were dying of cancer and didn’t want to go out without another bang (I recently looked up one of my favorite clients and instead found his obituary)."
Her strategy of avoiding trouble by keeping price higher even if lower frequency engagements may not be feasible for many, they may be unable to get clients at higher price points and like any biz pressure to generate revenue is immense.
Scenario A: Resourceful, successful, happy. Should she be forced to accept dangerous working conditions and live under the constant threat of eviction, imprisonment, harassment and stigma? Why? What's the argument in favor of making her life difficult?
Scenario B: Physical or mental disability, unattractive, can't afford to refuse clients even though they make her unsafe, doesn't have any other way to pay for rent, food, meds and diapers. Should she be prevented from going to the police when someone beats, rapes or robs her? Should she be prevented from organizing with her friends for mutual protection? Should she be prevented from advertising online and instead forced onto the streets? Again, why? What's the argument in favor of making her life even more difficult?
Marginalized workers in the cannabis industry got pushed out when Canada legalized cannabis.
Whenever I think about consumer electronics, I think they are turning into status symbols more than tools providing utility.
Most folks here live pretty safe and cushy lives that the majority of humanity doesn’t get to enjoy. Real life for most people requires understanding and defending these things and making conscious decisions to protect them. it doesn’t require someone be doing sex work for it to be that way.
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. I don't like the weird denial about that aspect of the transaction. It makes it difficult to trust the rest of her writing.
I saw escorts for a couple of years. It was often weird, when I just didn’t click with the woman, but I met a few really awesome people.
There are other down sides to escorting. One of the women I had seen a couple of times, was later murdered. They ended up catching the killer- another escort, I don’t know why. It was hard to grieve; we were not real close; her family probably didn’t want clients showing up at the funeral or any other reminder like flowers.
I ended up falling in love with one of the women I met and we dated for a while. It was a serious emotional roller coaster being in love with someone who was having sex with other men until she was ready to “go exclusive”. But in the end we got married after she retired.
Now it’s ten years later. We have a son and are still happy as can be.
If you’re thinking about seeing escorts, remember that since intimacy with other people is involved, there are often strong emotions as well.
> You can in fact get issued an escort license in some cities (e.g., San Francisco or Grand Chute, or Jefferson County, WA). I don’t know if this is a good idea, neither I nor anybody I know has applied for this, though I seriously considered. It’s possible it might grant you some legal protection, but also possible it might give you some legal issues, as it puts a lot of information about you in a government file that clearly states you are in fact an escort.
Based on that, from an escort viewpoint, the legal protections are not a worthy tradeoff for privacy.
Ultimately, in the context of the country/culture, legal protection is a progressive position, but it's not sufficient, unless complemented by a degree of anonymity. Not sure how that could work, though!
It seems clear to me anyway that what she was referring to is a similar trap marijuana growers have here in CA and other legal states. Namely that just because SF gives you a permit doesn’t make it legal (in that everyone who could come arrest you would not), and it may actually make it worse by putting you in a database of ‘known offenders’ for the next higher level of law enforcement to come after you. The state of California doesn’t recognize any permit in SF, and neither do the Feds, and if she crosses state lines in her work, the feds could go after her for it.
Would they do that right now? Probably not. Would some future different administration? Possibly.
And, since it’s required to use legal names and the like, and these records are permanent, it could be a decade or whatever in the future when politics have changed, or there could be a records leak and now your real legal name and occupation and home address or whatever is all over the Internet, and who knows when or if something weird happens.
Gun owners recently started having their records shared with various universities for instance, which include home addresses, names, and what they own - and have no legal recourse near as I can tell.
Legal, non-anonymous and socially respectable escort services used to exist, you know. It existed in south india as a practice for hundreds of years before the british came.
Devadasi as an institution was shattered first by Islamic invaders - who even record this in their journals. In-fact most Islamic historians explicitly declaim this as liberation of women in India and how Islamic conquest uplifted backward society in that era.
You can also look up Bangalore Nagarathnamma, Veena Dhanammal, Mylapore Gowri ammal, Coimbatore Thayi, Balasaraswathi, Muddupalani. Some of them have books written on them.
If you'd like more sources, plz let me know -- I'll send some book titles your way.
You can still hire no-sex escorts to accompany you to an event - such as a work event, or anything where you don't want people to think you're a saddo who can't get a girlfriend. I can imagine a closet queen employing such a service.
I don't think it really conveys any meaningful legal protections. I suspect it allows you to operate, but it won't mean that you will be treated with the same respect that a non escort would have got.
They are still not allowed to use normal payment providers, they cannot form companies, they cannot operate their own premises, with security (as that would border on prostitution, which is a stupid distinction)
Think of it as the police allowing pot dealers, even though it was still illegal to posses.
> future johns would avoid her if they knew that she had filed charges against a previous customer
So maybe she wouldn't tell them. Obviously, legalization should also imply a certain protection of their identities (e.g. if they are witnesses in a trial).
Social workers and police can of course make outdoor areas in which prostitutes work safer even if prostitution is not legalized. So that is not an argument in favor of legalization.
I didn't present an argument for the legalization of prostitution. In my opinion, there is no need for an argument since it's completely obvious to any normal human being that it is not a crime. Why on earth would selling sex for money be crime? Is it the sex that makes it a crime? What's wrong with sex?
There is a lot of hypocrisy in the discussion of this question, though. People frequently confound other crimes with prostitution that already are crimes and would continue to be crimes after legalization such as human trafficking, rape, coercion, sexual assault, etc.
Besides, it is completely obvious that legalization improves the working conditions of prostitutes. Contrary to what you state, the police cannot make outdoor areas where sex workers work secure if prostitution is illegal, since the police is forced to persecute crimes. They'd have to arrest these sex workers. Consequently, these will conduct their business far away from the police, which is exactly what makes their work particularly insecure when it is illegal. This is just one issue. There are many other reasons why illegal activities are generally less secure than the same activities when they are legal. Illegality attracts all kinds of shady people you can avoid if you are allowed to go legit. That's not even a controversial thesis.
That's the point, you don't want rapey Johns as your customers.
Just like mental fatigue (term meant as a catch all) is an integral and non separable part of IT work, the feelings described in the quote are not optional for sex workers! You WILL get burned by all the downsides of escorting, it WILL change how you perceive yourself, it WILL affect your dating life, relationships, etc.
Some are more resilient than others, you can deal with it better or worse and preparation surely helps. But don't think you can have your cake and eat it too.
I've started very open minded about the profession as a young man. Looking back on it I now think it was justification so I can allow myself to date sex workers as they are on average quite attractive, go figure. And while individuals differ and you can find the same issues outside of sex workers, the job guarantees some problems of which I personally I grew tired of. I am currently avoiding the profession for romantic interests and would not recommend anybody I care about to go into it. Discrimination sometime has objective serious motivation, the motives are just lost to some.
Sex work usually is tied to more Cluster B personality disorders, from my experience. But then, plenty of people I've dated (who hadn't ever done sex work) have the same issues.
I'm aware that the demographics that I have experience dating tend to skew high towards mental issues (I'm interested in more drug positive people, among other confounding factors which tend to attract people with preexisting mental issues). A lot of the factors aren't exclusive towards sex work, though- simply having an instagram account with 10K+ followers tend to signal a big difference in behavior, for example.
I imagined a graph of number of missed buttcrack hairs to the amount of light allowed in a session.
If the later, how do you account for different distances from the light source durring a given session?
It’d essentially be an escort service where the “John” finances the “shoot” renting your room, equipment, and the girl’s time. They could then take their film and destroy it or distribute it.
> I required deposits of 20% for long appointments (6+ hours), because I had a lot of time booked up that would be a painful loss if they cancelled. Deposits are hard to do because everybody wants anonymity and payment processers are cruel; I typically accepted amazon gift cards or crypto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_sca...
Do I understand correctly that sex work is still illegal in the US? If so, what's the rationale? Why can't consenting adults do what they want with their body?
It’s illegal everywhere but certain parts of Nevada. When you walk around the streets of Las Vegas you’ll therefore see hundreds and hundreds of fliers for girls.
As for the history… it’s a sordid one. Read e.g https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain–Kahn_Act. The US imprisoned women with venereal diseases found near military bases. Things sort of went from there, and also involves the “morality” of the American Christian and fears of the Progressives. Some more good reading: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/10512...
Today it is a partisan issue and one worked on at a state level. Manhattan’s DA vowed to “no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage” as of this April.[0] …meanwhile the Texas governor in August made buying sex a felony in August, the first state to ever do so.[1]
I don’t expect any significant national progress on this in my lifetime. But there has been a sea change in blue states over the past generation.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/nyregion/manhattan-to-sto... [1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/567760...
You can be prosecuted for giving an massage without a licence? I lived for a short while in the US, and regularly gave my female partner massages.
Thus, we’re seeing a push for relaxation of sex worker prosecution in essentially only blue states.
Edit: realizing that I didn't qualify that you'll be hard pressed to find any lawmaker pushing for full legalization of prostitution on either side of the aisle. Right now, the most common laws voted on are w.r.t criminality of 1. the sex workers and 2. the clients.
Longer answer: assuming there is no direct coercion, like a trafficker ring/pimp involved, I fail to see how this kind of struggle is any different than the single parent working night shifts at WalMart who still needs food stamps to feed the family. Or the low wage worker going to a factory each day ripping chickens apart so you can have your chicken breast and chicken nuggets.
If your theoretical mom can make a living that does not require her to work 14h days in two jobs and never really see her kids, good for her, regardless of whether that involves sex work.
Predatory drug dealers are not exclusive to sex work either. What's the alternative for your drug addicted hooker anyway? A "steady" job is probably out of the question at this point. So... burglary and robbery? I am empathetic to drug addicts and am all in favor of helping them, also at a regulatory level. Things like decriminalizing possession and easy access to a reasonably funded support system (with social workers, etc) and treatment for those willing to take that step. Driving drug addicts, who we as a society do not help enough or who refused our help, into a life of hard crime, taking away their livelihood and/or making them even more vulnerable to abuse (if you're a "lawless" prostitute, then you won't go to the police when you've been beaten up, raped and/or robbed for fear of being arrested yourself) is not a solution to me.
All the resources spent right now punishing prostitutes and their clients could be redirected at fighting the actual criminals (the predatory drug dealers, human traffickers and pimps), and to help and support people struggling with drug addiction or mental illness as well as victims of human trafficking.
I don't get how with prostitution a lot of people always proclaim "but we should ban it entirely because trafficking and pimps and drug dealers!". All the while we do not ban all factory jobs because "there are some sweat shops with defacto forced labor!".
Or do you see them all as exploitation?
As manifestations of the inherent injustices of our socioeconomic system?
Or something else?
How do you feel about the description "consenting adults"?
What about a female employee who doesn't stop her boss's sexual advances because he controls her income and career? Is that a transaction between consenting adults?
(I never commented on legality of sex work. I was commenting only on "consenting adults" and... see my other replies.)
You're trying to flip the script here. A boss (i.e. a concrete person yielding some form of power over another person) trying to coerce the employee is on the same line as a pimp or human traffickers using coercion (or worse).
I was never talking about that, I was talking about a person who looks at the options in the job market, and figures all on own their that prostitution is the least shitty option available to them. And some prostitutes reportedly even like their job well enough. But even if they don't, they can join the large group of other people who do not like their jobs either, but do it anyway to provide for themselves and loved ones.
There is no coerced consent.
Re-evaluate how you see people.
I was commenting on the casualness and callousness with which he uses "consenting adults" without regard to the power imbalance as well as the statistics with regard to sex workers and their "freedom".
Look at the attitude in the other replies:
> At least a woman can take the easy way out and become a prostitute. A man has no such "luxury". Society does not pity weak men the way it pities weak women.
> what you described applies to every single person in the world with a job.
> We all do stuff we'd rather not do for money.
And then there's the guy comparing strangers putting their penises into your mouth and vagina, always in fear of sexual assault, disease, degradation to "attending Scrum meetings and fixing CSS bugs."
Even you, with "but blame their johns", ignoring any notion of exploitation of the desperate and vulnerable.
It irritates me when people who are making the best of the hand they're dealt get talked down to like they haven't made a choice, and thrown in jail because they're trying to put food on the table. Yeah, vulnerable people are prostituting themselves because the alternative is worse, but how does making prostitution illegal fix the problem? It's a dumb knee-jerk reaction that makes everything worse - prostitution is driven underground, governments can't ask about working conditions or prosecute bad johns, and vulnerable people end up in jail.
It's interesting that this stricter form of consent doesn't extend to working shitty jobs at Walmart, McDonald's or cleaning toilets to pay the rent or buy your drugs. Why is work involving sex specifically the problem here? Is it something intrinsic to the work, or is it really the social stigma? And if it's the latter, isn't decriminalizing really the first step to solving that problem without removing women's agency and their ability to earn more money than working traditional menial job?
If sex work is just like any other job, then many, if not most Western welfare societies demand that an unemployed person takes any job in their skill-set.
So you end up demanding women go back to the prostitution - because there is an opening at the local brothel next to the truck stop.
This isn't theoretical - it has happened more than once in Germany.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/no-job-no-excuse-for-turning-do...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/outrage-after...
So, no - its not normal work.
1. Yes, most Western societies demand that an unemployed person takes any job in their skill-set.
2. Yes, there are certainly openings at the local brothel.
3. With any luck, there are also openings for other jobs at the local supermarket, or as teachers, or as nannies, or working the fields, or cleaning cars, or coding, or...
=> Yes, some women (and I imagine some men) are going to end up sex workers. Others are going to become supermarket employees, teachers, nannies...
I don't quite connect this to your affirmation that "its not normal work."
Legalisation, thereby making the same worker protections available as to everybody else, is precisely how to screw them over.
The messaging saying otherwise is largely from conservative and/or radfem organisations who're trying to get people to conflate prostitution and trafficking because they want to wipe out all prostitution, not just the coerced stuff.
There's a strong parallel to the war on drugs here - criminalisation largely benefits the criminals.
The obvious difference is that one can easily supply drugs in a legal market without engaging in other socially harmful behaviors. A closer analogy is trade in endangered animals. When you ban, e.g. the ivory trade and deprive it of a market, this has a direct effect on how many elephants get poached. Trying to regulate that trade more finely and preserve legal supply only makes things easier for those who engage in illegal activities, who can now misrepresent themselves as being part of a legal market.
Religion is used as an excuse, but that's also just old white men wanting to control people.
Its their female partners that push this agenda, to prevent sex from devaluation as currency.
The number of hoops these people jump through only to be eventually assaulted and robbed anyway are ridiculous. It's a very dangerous job and it doesn't really have to be!
The ongoing stigma around sex is ridiculous... censoring female nippes (not necessarily even related to sex!), bans on "suggestiveness," etc... I've heard of people who run OnlyFans accounts (not escorts) essentially get run out of town if they live in conservative areas... and they really only get found out because the men in the area are patrons!
The tech industry supports these stigmas in huge ways by automating it (often unsuccessfully I might add! at one point I was suspended from Facebook for sharing a sculpture). Push back against this nonsense if you can.
If every dude who wanted to get laid could do so as easily as arranging an LTL shipment that would negatively effect a far larger subset of the population.
In what way? has the population been negatively affected in places where it's already legal?
> 92 were stolen from.
Wow, that's a 22% chance of being robbed.
If you're paying $1200 for "company", in cash, I reckon it would be unusual to also carry much more than a tip. My guess is the people who got robbed were at the low-cost end of the trade. Or maybe the men that got robbed were rapey anyway, and not a good bet for future business.
I can only imagine the courage it takes to write something like this (you briefly hinted at the end).
Really appreciate your efforts to bring light and improve safety in a difficult line of work.
I too hope it doesn't affect your work, although I suspect you would get some unwanted attention with this exposure.
Amen to that. As an ignorant outsider looking in, the first thing that comes to mind is the possible huge safety benefits gained by collective bargaining. Even if it's not certified and recognized by the NLRB, there's gotta be something.
It's been legal in licensed settings for quite a while, but they're now changing to make it legal in more situations in response to requests from solo sex workers. I'm rather happy with the situation (and new improvements) as a client and my understanding is that workers are happy about it.
https://www.vic.gov.au/review-make-recommendations-decrimina...
Like all regulation should be...
No woman wakes up one day and says 'I want to sell my body for sex to the highest bidder' unless forced to by circumstance.
Decriminalization of marijuana in many places is getting people talking about it more openly, for example. It's not everything but it's a start.
And because a large subset of the population (which tend to be over-represented on the white collar parts of the internet who generally have the luxury of always being able to afford cost of compliance in their day to day lives) happily lets the state dictate their morals by mentally bucketing illegal things as immoral by default.
sure... and that's the best argument to recriminalize. Having yet more drugs that disrupt mental faculties is not a good thing
There are arguments against prostitution as a victimless crime, but it is not straightforward in any argument to demonstrate victim and perpetrator like it is with assassination, burglary, assault, etc.
Sorry, if you found my comment rude, i assure you that this was not my goal.
You used abortion there. I don't think we could get a consent from fetus, law just assumes that female parent have a power over it's life until some development point.
People consensually participate at gambling, dueling, pyramid schemes, become criplled drugs and alcohol addicts, selling themselves and they family to slavery, do suicide.
Nor consent, nor something being an old and persistent part of the human culture are good reasoning.
I don't think you consider assassination and prostitution equivilant crimes, yet you made the comparison. Why? What's the point of taking something out of context to invalidate it?
If you have reasons for opposing the legalization of sex work, they're completely lost on me. Maybe start there instead of pedantry.
I wonder if the police could exploit this practice to make arrests. Arrest an escort, get access to their email as evidence, then start going after the people who made reference requests. I suppose the email address could even be used to fake a reference for a sting, but I doubt that would be legal in the US. Probably the only reason this system works is the police don't care enough to exploit it.
But you already know who the people to "go after" are: they're advertising on the websites.
No it wasn't your mistake. It hurts me to see that people who have been through trauma blame themselves for it.
No she doesn't. You shouldn't label other peoples' experiences as "rape" willy-nilly like that.
Jeez, that is insane! good for them.
Once in a while, I come across something like this and wonder, what is it like to be that rich to casually drop 1,200 an hour, for anything, let alone on escorts.
> 8% reported legal trouble
> 8% reported being arrested
> 16% reported physical assault
> 17% reported contracting a STD
> 29% reported being stolen from
> 41% reported sexual assault
So no doubt the rates are in part a reflection of the risks providers take in the course of offering their services.
I wonder if any money is worth having an extreme risk of getting a deadly virus.
I've always been mildly curious, my first thoughts were "Less than I thought!".
Hear me out (criticism of my thinking on this is very welcome):
In LA's Ktown, a Domi (a job I had no idea existed just a few years ago... google if curious) charges a base rate of $100/hr, plus tips. For the client, there is no guarantee of nudity or any physical contact, though it's of course up to each individual what they're willing to do (and for how much).
From the perspective of the client, $100/hr buys you in-person company in a public setting with someone young, conventionally attractive, dressed skimpily. The person will (pretend to) politely listen to you as you talk, (pretend to) smile, (pretend to) laugh at your jokes, pour drinks for you, (pretend to) agree with your opinions, and, if they choose to, drink with you.
The market supports that price ($100/hr!) for work that does not require ANY sex as requisite. I imagined "entry level" sex work would be priced ~10x (min 7x) over work done (skimpily) clothed and in public, and that, like many other goods and services, "luxury" would have a multiplier over "entry level brand" between 5x and the stratosphere. (I guess with cars it's ~3x.)
These assumptions yield a price of $5k/hr for "luxury brand sex work", ~4x the empirical data. If we assume that "luxury" has a multiplier of just 3x (but I bet it's more!), then the ratio of the market price of sex work over somewhat similar (companionship, paid to be pretty and objectified) work done clothed and in a public venue, in the same city,... can be at most 4x.
Only 4x?
This is what shocks me! :)
Somebody reading this comment (probably making minimum wage) might be thinking 20$ (1200/60) per day food budget is a luxury.
Anyway, all I was wondering is - a super tiny percentage of the population can afford to spend 1200 an hour, on anything. Must be nice to be that rich, lol.
In the past 20 years, I've been nearly homeless, working 2 minimum wage retail jobs 60/h week and cursing the lack of time or energy to improve my situation, and, at another extrema, regularly charged about $1,200/day for my time.
Right now I'm MUCH closer to the former than the later. I can tell you the latter is more fun! ;) But, even then, I'd spend $100/h for a luxury like fine dining, and spending $1000/h for a luxury would have seemed absurd. I imagine if, one made 10x the money, then spending $1000/h for a luxury might make sense?
But, like you said, it must be nice, agreed.
You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
Also suprised the San Diego price is so high, when there is a red light district literally on the border in Tijuana, and those girls charge $60-$100/hr US to gringos (and less to spanish-speakers, locals, and people who pay in pesos)
> It strikes me somewhat oddly that one might pay so much for something that literally half the people on this planet is equipped to provide
High-end is basically differentiating yourself from average.
> You're paying for looks, ease, simplicity, no strings, and so on... I get it. But idunno, that is a lot of money for one nut.
It's cheap if you are rich and worried about lawsuits, law enforcement, blackmailing, your reputation, etc... Suddenly, $1200/h is quite cheap.
$1200 an hour, with a minimum 1.5 hours, so $1800. In addition to a 20-minute roll in the hay, you get an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men.
So these "half the people on the planet": if they're not prostitutes, then you will have to date them. You are not going to cop if you take your date out to KFC. Even taking them to a posh restaurant won't guarantee you'll get your end away.
So let's say you manage to get a date 6 nights a week, and you shell-out for a meal and a show ($350 each?). Let's say half of them are people that interest you. Let's say half of those would consider bonking someone on the first date.
So you're out-of-pocket $2100, you've spent three evenings chatting to someone that didn't interest you, and two of the others want more meals and shows (but how many?)
I think my guesses are wild overestimates. I have no idea how one might ever get 6 dates a week. Most women won't bonk you on the first date. Far less than 50% of women are "interesting" (FSVO interesting).
If your time is scarce and valuable, your standards are high, and you have enough money to e.g. take holidays in nice places, then spending a couple of grand on a classy girl for the evening, with a guaranteed payoff, doesn't look insane.
Throwing money at escorts is such a loser move (and the experience so far away from sex with a woman that truly desires you) that only someone who's never experienced the latter would seriously argue for paying 1200$ to have 20 minute sex with "an attractive, intelligent person for company, who is skillful at flattering men."
There's depths to it like you can't even imagine.
Sex is a market, and like any market, it has theories that can explain it.
For example: in most places, most of the time, prostitutes charge the same "rate" as wives do, because they're suppliers in competition, and the market sets the price.
Oh, you think your wife doesn't "charge" you for sex? How quaint and romantic! Of course she does. You're paying more rent. You're paying for more food. You're paying with expensive gifts, trips, and most importantly, you're paying to raise one or more kids. In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
If you step outside of your world for a second and look at it from the outside like an anthropologist might, you'll note that $1200/hour is about right for the "market price" in an nicer part of the world for affluent men. Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
Why?
> You're paying with expensive gifts, trips
Willingly
> you're paying to raise one or more kids
How is that a payment to wife? Those are my kids, it was my decision to make them so now I support them.
> In many countries it's literally a crime for men not to pay child support.
What does paying your social duties has with "payment to your wife"? What, society should raise your offsprings for free?
> Most men have sex once or twice a week with their spouse, and more than half of their disposable income goes towards their partner and their kids.
Partners are not exclusively for sex, partners are someone you want to spend your life with and, optionally, make kids.
Do you have problems with your wife or smth?
What a strange perspective. In the US at least, having a wife makes you richer, as most women work, and you still live in a one bedroom, so your total income is significantly higher but your costs are only marginally higher. Getting married to another member of the workforce is a great way to build wealth.
She sort of addresses it in the sentence that ends: "...and might be more likely to attract higher power men who are looking to “unlock” something they feel few other people have seen – your nudity."
I guess it's like anything. Things with a higher price feel more exclusive and we desire the things we can't have. If you can afford it, why would you skimp? If it's less affordable - maybe you'd prefer it to feel like an experience (at least in your own head) rather than 'one nut'?!
People will pay for convenience.
Also, if you are the higher paid earner in stable relationship I invite you to tally up the monthly cost sometime.
This is a luxury high-end part of the market. Ruled by the same dynamics as $200 steaks or $2000 bottles of champagne.
No steak is worth $200. But several people up-thread have made the point that $1200 per hour isn't that much, if you consider the alternatives (e.g. getting married - and if you can afford $1200 for a night out, then the divorce is probably going to be very, very expensive).
Median income is $100,000/yr. My impression (from HN) is this isn't abnormal for non-entry-level tech workers in the US.
Edit: It's just about the median software engineer salary in the US. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...
Edit2: This previous read "100,000/hr". A transcription mistake.
I'm curious what you think about the relative price comparison to hostess work in LA outlined above. Either you're charging too little, or.. there's some.. interesting implied conclusions about the low relative cost (from the worker's perspective) for sex work! Or there's not enough information liquidity in the market? Or...
I Am Not An Economist, but... I can't shake the feeling there's a mispricing somewhere. Possibly a juicy topic for a paper, blog post, or Planet Money episode.
Also, that gonewild post is genius. Thanks for the laughs.
Disagree. High end work of all sorts isn't the sort of thing you punch in and out of. Both have a high opportunity cost, in that in both cases you'll find it hard to work a similarly compensated second job. Also remember this is only "billable hours".
Edit: I just realized you've completely missed my point. I was replying to a comment the clients (i.e. not the sex workers) are crazy rich. I was presenting an argument for why they aren't.
Do you mean per year?
And for what it's worth, flying to many places with a family of four can cost $1200/hour even in economy class.
Race to the bottom?
As someone who used services in the past, I don’t understand why anyone would spend any money at all on those… but they do find clients. Maybe it’s because if I lower my standards I can just easily find someone “for free” instead.
This is from a group of sex workers who appear to be screening their clientele. I wonder how high the number would be among sex workers who don't have the same amount of financial safety net that someone who can pick and chose their clients has.
I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place. I always hear how sex work just needs to be regulated and everything would be fine, but how does one prosecute something that happens in a private setting, behind closed doors?
And to elaborate on the prosecution part, in the wake of #MeToo, a lot of people came out with their stories, but not many of them pursued a legal route. I got the feeling that proving many of those allegations would be difficult in a legal system and whatever cases that did go through the legal system had a preponderance of evidence - along with immense social pressure - backing them up (think Bill Cosby/Harvery Weinstein). This is what made me wonder how much of a deterrent decriminalization/regulation would be on sexual assaults. Do we have to use public shaming, like in #MeToo, as a deterrent mechanism?
"Something is either morally wrong or it isn't, it can't be slightly morally wrong" Therein lies the difficulty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIYfiRyPi3o
Yes, let's make men who want to pay for sex watch an hour-long video extolling the virtues of "real" relationships.
The reality is that there are a lot of men who enter into "normal" relationships with women in large part because it gives them easier access to sex. Not all of them are happy. Lots of them overextend themselves financially, and generally do things they wouldn't otherwise do, to keep their girlfriends satisfied.
These are less direct exchanges, but they are exchanges nonetheless.
I'm living in East Asia, which has made me think more about the exchanges that take place in relationships between men and women. Here, it's common to see men with expressionless looks on their faces lugging their girlfriends' handbags, spending 20 minutes helping them take cutesy photos, pushing strollers carrying not children but tiny, professionally-groomed pups, etc.
As a warm-blooded man, you'd have a hard time convincing me that access to sex isn't a big reason these men are putting up with this stuff. Why do men who pay for sex need a diversion mechanism but the men who totally lose themselves in a relationship don't?
Universal basic income
We prosecute tons of things that happen between closed doors, already... Including sexual assault.
> I also wonder how those assaults could be brought down, if that is even possible in the first place.
I doubt we would ever get it down to the background rate, but having a high base rate means there is a lot of room for improvement.
Just legalizing it would probably help. Having an above ground would likely improve the quality the background check network, and would increase the accessibility of information on how to be a sex worker with relative safety.
Beyond that, the potential to have a good relationship with police would probably be a big help. I doubt it would see much actual use (who wants to risk a reputation of getting their clients arrested), however at least some people would be more careful if they thought there was a chance that the sex worker could report them.
There is also the option of proper brothels, with panic buttons and bouncers listening in for screams.
I guess I am mainly surprised there aren't more takers. Sex work may be degrading and hard to swallow for many but then again working long hours in a minimum wage job often isn't much more appealing either.
Maybe it's about lack of information, maybe about fear or maybe I don't understand human nature as well as I think I do. It just seems to me there should be many more takers than there seemingly are.
I can't speak for other nations, but realistically the US unemployment/welfare system is game-able to the extent that many people can choose to just get by this way instead.
I'm leaving out my own moral judgements here, because it's not relevant, but I know enough individuals firsthand who survive on government support to say that it's possible.
After being shocked at how low the price is, considering how the market prices a related job (see my other comment for details), the second thought I had is that there might be some interesting low MRR startupish product opportunities.
I asked him what was the big deal after all, at the end of the day aren't we all making some bad decisions? Aside from being a good date, that thing he couldn't really put his finger on was around intimacy: she seemed to be, as he described, dead inside, the sex felt fake, somewhat mechanical or acted out.
Well, that's a very positive way of formulating this. This could be put more accurately as: "If you decide to enter a long-term relationship, you will have to either find a partner who wouldn't mind sex work (might be difficult!) or lie to them (ouch!)"
I think it's important to highlight the diversity of sex work. This one passage caught my attention:
> SeekingArrangement – This website, unlike the above, professes to definitely not allow escorts, and makes it difficult to be explicit about it. Most men connecting through the website anticipate paying around 50-70% less, as women tend to be willing to accept less money if you give them a veneer of not being a real sex worker. You can still attempt to do clear sex work here though – “PPM”, or pay-per-meet, indicates that you want to be paid per meeting, and this is the way to start out the discussion. Seeking Arrangement also had the lowest correlation with arrests,
Nearly all of my experience with sex work (as a client) is off Seeking Arrangment. For those unfamiliar it's a site for people to engage in "sugar dating", where a "sugar daddy" compensates a "sugar baby" to spend time with him, ostensibly unconnected to any expectations of sex. I find these terms cringeworthy, I'll call it compensated dating. In practice there's almost always expectations of sex. There's definitely a sizeable overlap between SA and traditional escorting sites, browse both and you'll come across the same profiles with moderate frequency. But in general, "sugar dating" involves a sizeable chunk of activities beyond having sex. It's expected to take dates out to dinner, movies, and other activities one would normally do on dates.
I think Aella is being a bit snide when she calls this "the veneer of not being a real sex worker". Almost all of the people I met considered it sex work and weren't under any illusion about the fact that money was changing hands in exchange for sex. When I asked why they preferred compensated dating rather than escorting the reasons were primarily twofold:
* Safety. It's not uncommon for people to meet in person once or twice before agreeing to meet for sex. These initial meetings are almost always in public or semi-public places (restaurants, bars, parks, malls). Most people give each other real names after meeting in person. I suppose this could also reduce safety, but there's a M.A.D. element of this that seems to work.
* Sense of connection, quality of experience. Many of the women on SA that I met spoke negatively of instances where men only saw them for an hour to have sex and didn't want to spend time together outside of the bedroom. Do they really just care about "the veneer of not being a sex worker"? Maybe, but I get the sense that many genuinely have a more enjoyable experience - or at least more tolerable experience - meeting someone few times platonically before having sex.
Speaking from the male perspective here, I'm really not sure why someone would prefer escorting over compensated dating. Aella is right that it's 50-70% less expensive. Maybe a bit less if one factors in cost of meals and activities. But $/hr of time spent together is easily 4-5x less than escorting. Personally I'm the type that sees the expectation of spending time together outside of the bedroom as a positive rather than a negative, so it's a win on both counts. Between $1200 for 90 minutes with someone and $400-700 in exchange for having dinner with someone, sex, taking a bath together and talking, and spending the night together the latter is way preferable.
The only potential negative is possibly the overlap of sugar dating and real relationships. I know both men and women who have moved in with, and in one instance gotten married to, people they met off SA. The one negative experience I had was with someone who wanted to have a real relationship and I did not, leading to a falling out and stuff being said about me - fortunately nothing that actual led to significant repercussions.
Talent is generally understood to mean an innate ability, but for any practical advice in this direction that can be put into words, well, some readers would be very grateful to know it.
Why does this give me "think different" vibes?
Sorry if your question was mostly rhetorical or generally just tongue in cheek. I promise I don’t intend to patronize. I guess you inspired me.
I have several female friends who are escorts, or rather "providers", and the term most frequently used for the men (as OP said) is "hobbyists". However, they don't really see "hobbyist" as derogatory as OP claims. Which is interesting.
I'm saddened that she describes such a solo experience. There is (was before COVID) a weekly meetup at a local restaurant where the providers got to know each other and swap stories. There was a back channel network where they could blacklist individuals. It was a cohesive group that looked out for each other. They even had presentations on how to launder money through Etsy. As OP said, the IRS will notice!
In addition, some women jumped in for a short period, but some stick around. One friend have been at it for over 15 years: there long-term relationships are pretty amazing to hear about. We dated and I would sometimes get de-identified summaries of fetishes.
There are "old timers" in this profession just like programming. This OP is like a ReactJS dev talking to CGI-BIN devs. I use this analogy becuase one of my friends worked mostly with programmers and went by "RubyGetsRailed" online.
EDIT: I hope I'm not mansplaining, but it is a diverse community that exists everywhere and I wanted to share the variations I've encountered.
Un-stigmatize sex work.
This felt informative, thanks
Holy shit, why do ppl pay this? Honestly wondering. Cant most people just go hook up at a bar or smth if they're that desperate?
I’d say that most important is that she was SUPER thoughtful about the experience she provided to her clients. Things like identifying non-latex condoms to avoid allergies, wearing a short necklace so it won’t slap him in the face.
Whenever I pay more for something and am glad I did, it’s almost always because I am impressed by the attention to detail. Then again, maybe that’s because I, too, pay attention to detail.
Most people can "just go hook up" at a bar or whatever, but then again, most people don't pay for escorts. Some people can't "just go hook up", though, and I would assume those people form a significant part of escorts' client base (the author described these as inexperienced young people). The author also described other motivations, like busy rich people, and people wanting to cheat on their partners.
Great writing and plenty of consulting advice in the article. Thanks for sharing.
Good SWE in Europe - $40k-$60k
Good SWE in US. . . . - $250k-$350k
300k+ is, from what I gather, very high for US, whereas 50k is more or less entry level in western EU. But take my impression as a data point (or a cluster), not the ultimate source of truth.
E.g. > Escort moves to country B from country A.
> Acquires list of clients and determines their local contacts
> Leaves country B
> Informs previous clients that they need to submit monthly BTC payments or else contacts will receive secretly recorded videos
Continue to jump between countries and create larger baseline of blackmail dividends.
Bitcoin: a solution desperately searching for a problem.
because your fellow (female) nationals choose to have sex with Americans? Is America responsible for these choices?
Are "unaware partners" getting just porn? Should women not get to choose who they have sex with before marriage?
https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...
(this post is way better though)
> I posted a similar article by the same author a couple of years ago called "An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" but it got flagged to death
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ (first post, later ones linked from the top)
There is no certifing body (in most countries) on who can call themselves engineers unlike doctors or lawyers.
So it is really up to you , whether you see what you do as engineering (not only with software) or not
Regardless of whether prostitution should be legalized on liberal grounds, it is not prosocial behavior and it is unfortunate that the taboo against it seems to be decaying.
Live theater, concerts, and therapy are all purchased experiences, too, and they can all be pretty powerful experiences on either side of the transaction. I don't see why escorting that includes conversation would be any different.
But I must say that this escort is super smart and has a really good sense of business. This article also gave me some newfound respect for escorts for the fact that although on the surface they seem to mostly just use their bodies, they do put in a lot of effort on the business and strategy side which people don't talk about.
I hope you hate capitalism then. It's all about supply and demand. As a gay man with some friends who escort, their rates are much lower, both for obvious reasons (it is ridiculously easy for most gay men to find other men to have sex with) and less obvious ones (IMO there is much less of a stigma among gay men for escorting, and at least friends I knew who did it expressed little shame at doing it).
The ethical calculus appears to be more complicated than the straightforward 2 consenting adults engaged in a victimless crime.
Consider the current rates of single mothers, the increasing trends of broken homes and higher divorce rates, one is forced to really examine what is under the belly of this beast.
Is there causality, or not?
Do kids pay the price from easier access to family breakups? Do these side deals even lead to breakups at all, or were they just serve to speed up the inevitable ?
I would like to understand if there is a way to estimate the impact of any broad change in policy.
Thing do bode well in one respect: AFAIK, decriminalizing marijuana in portugal led to less drug abuse.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-divorce-rate-has-hit-a-50-...