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?
If an in-house hair dresser was assaulted/robbed/stolen from, they would be able to report it to the police. There would be a strong chance (well as high as any other crime) that it would be punished.
There would also be an opportunity to use/create a verification scheme for clients, but also ask for insurance/tax/qualifications for the hair dresser.
This is what operating in a "decriminalized" world looks like. You don't get harassed by the law, but they wont help you either.
Ideally we would have a world where sex work is legally allowed (so long as its not coerced) and allow those workers to form companies, hire security, use payment systems, have vetting functions. All of the services that would make life much less precarious.
I know that in the people I have encountered in the sex worker world (who are related but not the same as escorts) are very against "legalisation" as they fear it would lead to registers and no chance to limit or control anonymity.
So unless the moral objections are sorted, I don't see any future in these changes.
In the UK, being paid by a pro sex-worker for services in support of that work is a crime called "Living off immoral earnings", and it's treated quite a bit more seriously than prostitution. How do you tell whether the big guy in the car across the street is really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
https://www.inbrief.co.uk/offences/living-off-immoral-earnin...
Modern law has been complicated somewhat by a change in heart. There was an attempt at loosening the rules around prostitution(pre 2009), but they have subsequently been tightened a bit. In short its a mess.
> really just protection, or whether he's a pimp, taxing a harem of girls with threats of violence?
this is where I diverge from sex workers on my opinion on this. They are pushing for discrimination. But this doesn't solve the coercion/security hired help issue.
The only practical way I can see it going away is by allowing sex workers to be fully legalised, as in form a company, have accounts, pay tax, be inspected by environmental health(or would it be CQC?). have three workers, but only pay tax for one? time for an inspection!
There are risks, and the stigma will force people underground. Holland and germany _still_ have a people trafficking problem
I suspect there are better ways, but unless it sex work can be done on the high street(well not literally), we will never truly over come the stigma, and subsequent exploitation of people.
She has little to no access to state sanctioned violence. Call it what it is. If she has a business dispute she has no recourse, she can't sue the other party and get the state to put them in a cage if they don't pay. Drug industry also has the same problem and does its violence in-house. Formerly prostitution did in-house the violence necessary to settle business disputes (i.e. pimps) but the internet has changed the business model somewhat.
The OP's judgment was that he saw no reason why this escort's business should be illegal. That's not a judgment on whether other forms of prostitution should be legal.
Also it hard from government to legalize only some form of prostitution over others even if politically that is possible, practically impossible to enforce.
Also it's not at all difficult to legalize only some forms of prostitution. Consider this analogous situation: it's hard for a government to legalize only some forms of cutting people with knives, but we seem to do fine legally distinguishing surgery from assault with a deadly weapon.
Otherwise the rest is the same. Most clients are whatever. A few she got to know well and liked. She worked with another person who did screening for her, etc.
Also mean income (as measured by her study of other workers) is $100,000 with her average rates of her sample around 500-600.
Effectively
= F(x)(y)(z)
X - number of people earning 200x the hourly rate
Y - % of that interested in paying for sex[1]
Z - relative beauty rank among service providers[2] in that area
[1] age is strong factor so demographics is a good proxy metric.
Also perhaps friction with law is proxy for cultural acceptance and can be numerically scaled : fully legal, decriminalized, or criminal with quantum of punishment for scaling. And degree of enforcement measured by number of arrests / convictions etc.
[2] probably being 9 in LA wouldnt be the same as say Wyoming( demand would be lesser as a counter pressure)
[3] touring is a thing perhaps because of this.
No, prices are almost standardized, at least in the 'normal' escorting world. I was surprised by this at first. My belief had always been that it'd be super competitive and the hottest girls would charge the highest prices, but it's not like that. Turns out guys don't really care that much about what a girl looks like beyond a baseline level of beauty, which is why so many can get away with hiding their face.
What does matter a lot is what special services are offered (e.g. dominatrix stuff has a different price), and customer retention, which is 100% about whether you're nice and make the guys feel happy. The most successful girls are the ones that develop a loyal customer base. A few men even follow the girls around as they tour, but that's rare. Girls who are cold, uninterested etc don't get repeat custom and exhaust the area quite quickly.
Whether to go high end or not probably depends a lot on how much else you have going on in life. Aella presumably has lots of other projects like OnlyFans, social media etc. This girl was a full timer. It was her job, and she worked pretty long hours (not anymore). She didn't use social media or create websites or whatever. That's normal. Most escorts use ad sites but they aren't creating dedicated websites for themselves. This girl doesn't even use social media at all, not even in her personal life (and never did, and she's not old).
I did ask her once about the high end work but she indicated that at these sorts of prices you could get maybe one client a month, which just wasn't enough to be interesting given she could be making thousands per day reliably by charging a more normal price (a few hundred an hour). And of course with fewer customers you're a lot more exposed to one of them not coming anymore. The people saying "wow $1200/hr is a lot" are right, I suspect only in Silicon Valley are there a large enough percentage of über-rich but unlucky-with-women people to pay those sorts of rates. Most guys visited her around payday, it was a very cyclical business.
If you do ever get to know an escort on a personal level, or especially more than one, be aware that this is a world that will seem - to the average office worker at least - astoundingly racist. It's touched on in the article but is something else that surprised me a lot. All the girls have strong opinions about different races and a large number demand to know a client's race before they turn up and will simply refuse clients of particular races. There is no stigma or shame associated with such discussions or policies. In escorting there are no HR departments to tell people what to think, 'diversity' isn't a thing, they're all independent or at most work with one or two other girls who are just like them. Learning about this made me reflect a lot on to what extent the middle class office/tech world obsession with anti-racism is a function of the heavy level of filtering that goes on at the front door as part of selecting for skills, university, background etc. The belief that everyone is culturally homogenous and race is just a pigment, just doesn't fly amongst escorts. They learn to generalize about their client base very quickly. To them the link between race and culture is both real and of critical importance.
I am surprised that saturation can happen in 2 weeks. Unless I am completely clueless about this, that is probably maybe 20-25 appointments (having more than sex 3-4 times a day especially professionally(she seemed to do most of the work) must be incredibility exhausting ). Even if more was possible I can't manage to schedule more than 3 external work meetings a day that is not video conference, scheduling definitely must be more challenging than that here.
It seems pretty small pool if saturated after only 20-25? Perhaps the screening process or narrow advertising ability ( only few platforms allow/ expensive) limiting the reach or competition is pretty heavy at this price point perhaps.
What you are describing regarding race is they find putting race a filtering criteria helps keep screening easier (Somewhat analogous to companies only hiring from tier-1 universities etc ). Better screening leads to better results in hiring rather than arbitrary criteria, I can attest to this in hiring, perhaps it applies here as well but it usually cheaper /easier to implement criteria than screen candidates better for companies. If institutional resources don't do it well, independent workers can hardly be expected to do better. I don't think anything is wrong in sex workers applying race or any type of criteria, it is risky and vulnerable business without any legal or social support, they have to err on the side of caution if they can.
I am not sure there has been exploration of the emotional stress and challenges for the client too. Imagine being rejected often(race or not) even when you are ready to pay for sex on top being unable to attract partners normally that would be quite hard to accept for anyone.
Also the amount of personal information clients are expected to share and references they need to have (while I understand why it is being asked) is pretty steep. There are so many vectors this information may leak from and could damage your life/marriage, lead to arrests etc. That has got to be stressful too.. I would be totally paranoid towards sharing any PII, I guess a good chunk of rich men in the valley would also hesitate on that.
So within two weeks (working 6-7 days per week) it's easy to pack in like 80 different punters and there's a limited supply in most towns. Most men aren't visiting, and there are plenty of other girls competing for the business. In a big city sure you can't saturate it but there's also correspondingly much more competition and the police are more active, so some of them prefer to avoid the cities and stick to the smaller conurbations.
Most men don't share any PII. They pay in cash and may or may not use their real names. If they get "banned" it's the phone number that gets banned.
My understanding was cash is more because tax or no service from formal banking, not directly to hide identity
I guess the government's objective is to kill the business completely, which is about as realistic as prohibiting alcohol.
This increases competition of sex workers for johns, artificially drives prices down, gives johns greater bargaining power over sex workers, and doesn’t fix the problem of johns trying hard to remain anonymous and requiring situations where you’re less able to go to the police if you wanted. Sex workers hate this.
I don't have an opinion(or data) on whether this is effective or is good approach or not, just wanted point out that it is less about driving demand down, they are not trying to criminalize johns(it already was) but trying to address issues on the workers side perhaps ineffectively.
The law is supposedly there to protect the sex workers, but you don't do that by forcing into hiding and making it unlikely that any crimes against them will be reported by anyone else.
If they really cared about the sex workers they would instead make it easy for them to get anonymous support with health, in particular mental health, and drug abuse problems. And institute a hotline for sex buyers to call without risk getting into any legal troubles if they suspect that a sex worker needs any help for whatever reason.
It is extremely hard to differentiate who is involuntary legally even if there was strong provisions for it and sex workers mostly can not pay for expensive legal counsel who can make that case.
Nordic laws are an attempt to not decriminalize sex work at the same time not punish the workers at all.
It is not about controlling demand over supply
All your caveats upfront on the quality of sampling is more than I have seen in many academic papers.
I don't have experience either as service provider or client to give a professionally informed comment here.
However having said that, sex work in general (even only in the United States) starts at lot less than 200-300$/hour in the lower end of the your study[2]. It is a great study and amazing subject testimony but it does only cover mid to high end of the spectrum.
As a basis for policy making covering the lower end of the spectrum and cover specifc policy issues and also cover other stakeholders like healthcare, law enforcement, welfare etc would be important.
I am sure there are lot more qualified people than me you are already in touch/working with, however I am happy to offer my help with statistics or code or lit review and publish formally /research proposal if you wish to go down that route.
[1] Your content, there are some parallels with how startups publish quality industry reports as a brand recognition strategy that I found very interesting.
[2] you have indicated the limitations in many places quite clearly am not finding faulting with your study .
Marginalized workers in the cannabis industry got pushed out when Canada legalized cannabis.
What is a marginalized worker in the cannabis sector?
If I want drugs, I buy the drugs the dealer is pushing.
In a legal market for sex, a customer can be more selective, so the less desired workers will lose customers.
When weed was legalized the bottom rung of the weed dealers, lost their market to stores who suddenly offered a better option to consumers.
Marginalization in the cannabis dealer scene would be poor people who sell a bit of weed to make ends meet or cheap/free weed in exchange for dealing.
Legal stores are employing people legitimately and paying taxes, so I don't mind if some dealers now have to quit or diversify. The more jobs we have in legal drugs the fewer required in the illegal drug trade. This is a net positive to society.
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.