Prostitution and the internet
economist.com
economist.com
Twitter is also a very useful resource for sex workers and clients. It's a useful way for a worker to promote themselves and for potential clients to get a feel of the person before making a booking.
Even in a country where sex work is legal, I feel there is still quite a bit of opportunity to create a better online resource. Especially one that caters to the sex workers more. I feel a lot of websites are too client-centric and not as useful as they could be for client or worker.
> There are even review sites where users can review -
> often in unnecessary & very creepy detail - their
> misadventures
"unnecessarily objectify the women they review"
"Sorry, I didn't quite catch that, a torn phone?"
"No, the porn phone"
"The what phone? We have a great new Samsung Galaxy-"
"THE PORN PHONE ALREADY!!"
I still wouldn't shop there though.
I expect that selling a porn phone would be like selling vibrators. If you really want to move the later you need to call it a neck massager.
I think plausible deniability / actual versatility is key in selling anything for which a big unstated selling point is enabling 'sex'.
Porn undoubtedly helped speed the adoption of VCRs and later Internet connected PCs, but they were sold as a way to watch Bambi with the family or for the kids to do homework.
Interestingly, they mentioned that they are now moving all servers and content to Google infrastructure.
You would probably select hair color, bust, age, ethnicity, body type, and see recent test results for STI tests. Then you'd probably get an estimates time when they'd arrive to your place.
It would be extremely interesting to see anonymous user data from such a service.
That said, I think the market for GFE and escorts is the future since legal prostitution means a general depression in prices so its no longer worth it to engage in what's actually a pretty physical activity.
> FOR those seeking commercial sex in Berlin, Peppr, a new app, makes life easy. Type in a location and up pops a list of the nearest prostitutes, along with pictures, prices and physical particulars. Results can be filtered, and users can arrange a session for a €5-10 ($6.50-13) booking fee. It plans to expand to more cities.
Do you care to back up your claim with some evidence or at least shed some light how you came up with it in the first place?
> Plus, there's a logbook to keep, and regulations that demand that truckers don't drive for longer than 11 hours a day and spend at least 10 hours sleeping. So another big part of trucking is, of course, lying about all that s..t.
So it doesn't seem to me that laws are the definite answer to the problem.
As a side note, even if there were a legal framework, would a trafficked person have access to it? I doubt traffickers allow their "employees" to have private, uninterrupted talks with the customers (or anyone). Hell, I don't even know how to say "Help, I'm being held against my will" in Dutch.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158076
[2] http://www.cracked.com/article_21488_5-terrifying-things-onl...
Of course there is a risk if you over regulate it that there will still be black market prostitution happening. Especially if those regulations result in a price increase. Which regular health checks and access to social/legal counselling would certainly do.
The fact that they are so well registered is also one of the reasons why we feature so high on the UN's numbers. In very few other countries can you just survey all registered worker and then label them as trafficking victims whether they agree with that label or not.
Do you know for example that most human trafficking number includes every prostitute that has paid someone for assistance with moving to the Netherlands? Like finding a house, opening a bank account and things like that?
Human trafficking is to prostitution what child porn is to online privacy.
As far as I can tell trafficking is not a huge problem. There is certainly no incentive for the majority of clients to seek out trafficked workers when the legal options are very easily available.
I've also heard a couple of stories where there have been violent clients or clients refusing to pay, and they worker just went to the police to help sort it out. So at least here the system is ok.
international sex database isexdb.com
[Sorry, throw away account, as you may imagine...]
If you are serious about gender equality and about human rights, please stop for a minute and educate yourselves in relation to the following questions: * Can a teenager truly and freely choose prostitution? Does she have an alternative? Should we allow people to become slaves if they choose to? Should we allow the selling of human organs in the free market? * What are the mortality rates and health risks facing women and men in prostitution? Is it like any other occupation? Does it bear any similarity to a guitar teacher? * Cui bono? Who benefits from prostitution? * Are there any happy stories of people in prostitution? When they share their experiences, what do they tell? How does it feel like to be penetrated 12, 15, 20 times a day?
Here are some links to abolitionists sites: http://prostitutionresearch.com/ http://www.veronicasvoice.org/ http://abolishprostitutionnow.wordpress.com/ http://www.antipornography.org/ex-porn-star-Vanessa-Belmond.... http://www.enddemandillinois.org/
Also the arguments are a bit weak, the mortality rates may be higher than a guitar but what about a crab fisherman or police officer? You can be extreme on both sides. You could be so myopically libertarian as to neglect how certain forms of prostitution will affect society but you are on the other side of that extreme.
You are also right to argue that I'm on one side of the extreme, it is radical to call for the abolition of prostitution. I do not consider it as a pejorative description. I would just like to remind you that the faction in the antebellum Republican Party who called for the abolition of slavery was called the radical wing, and was considered extremist by Lincoln himself as well as many other northerners who could not imagine the emancipation of the slaves.
It's very easy to take a radical position and just appeal to "well these people thought the world was flat, but look how silly they are now" type observations but I don't think it strengthen to position. Slavery was the forcing people to work and leave their families against their, amongst other things.
When people argue against the criminalization of prostitution, they are not in support of traffickers. It's not radical to say people should not be forced to have sex, even if you think this makes you like Lincoln.
My argument was not prostitution equals slavery per se. My point was that the term radical refers to the abolition of a phenomena and therefore should be considered in relation to that phenomena and not by itself. If you believe that prostitution, or even some forms of it, is a wonderful thing that promotes human dignity then I can see why my radical stand against it seems bad to you. I think prostitution harms the people in it and harms us and therefore taking measures like legislation in hope of a radical change seems to me to be reasonable and positive, even if there is a very tiny minority among the people in prostitution who claim to have chosen freely with their eyes wide open.
If there are women being forced into sex then there are laws already to protect them.
Why do you feel its necessary to tell other people how to live their lives?
Who are you to decide whether a woman and a man can agree to exchange money and sex?
- "If there are women being forced into sex then there are laws already to protect them" - According to a comprehensive study held in numerous countries, "71% of respondents had been physically assaulted while in prostitution, 63% had been raped, and 68% were said to meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. ... 89% of the respondents wished to leave prostitution, but lacked the means to do so."[1]
- "Why do you feel its necessary to tell other people how to live their lives?" Liberty is the freedom to live your life however you choose as long as you do not harm others. Clients harm people in prostitution.
-"Who are you to decide whether a woman and a man can agree to exchange money and sex?" I'm someone who cares about the women, men and children in prostitution. Who are you and who do you care about?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Farley#Studies_of_sex_... [there's a link to the full study]
"Her prostitution studies have been criticized by sociologist Ronald Weitzer, for alleged problems with their methodology. In particular, Weitzer was critical of what he viewed as the lack of transparency in how the interviews were conducted and how the responses were translated into statistical data, as well as the sampling bias toward highly marginalized groups of sex workers (such as street workers) and for the way the findings of Farley's studies have been more generally applied to demonstrate the harm of sex work of all kinds. A 2002 study by Chudakov, et al. used Farley's PTSD instrument to measure the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder among sex workers in Israel. Of the fifty five consenting women interviewed, 17% met the criteria for PTSD, compared to Farley's 68% figure. Farley's critics also claim that her findings are heavily influenced by her radical feminist ideology.
Farley has also been criticized for accepting significant funding from anti-prostitution organizations. She has acknowledged that 30% of funding for a prominent research project into prostitution was provided by the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, an agency with an outspoken policy which conflates sex work with human trafficking. However, Farley has stated that such funding has not in any way swayed her research, in particular its methods or conclusions."
Regarding your conviction that it "keeps a natural lid on male aggression and violence." I would argue that it is completely false and degrade men, but if you insist I would urge you to volunteer to the joy division and keep the lid on male aggression and violence yourself before volunteering other people to do the nasty job.
In Sweden, there are more teenage boys that have prostituted themselves than teenage girls. The majority of these are middle-class kids who use this extra income to buy themselves status items such as clothes, gadgets, or jewelry.
This issue is very nuanced, and you should be skeptical of anyone making definitive claims about all prostitutes, or all prostitution.
So one answer to your questions would be 1) Yes, see above, and 2) Yes, these kids could get any number of legal part-time jobs, but they freely choose this. They're not stupid, they're not poor, they're not forced, yet this is the choice they make knowing, or thinking they know, the full consequences of it.
One of the major obstacles to leaving prostitution, and not just for kids, is the addiction to money. However, it is not an easy money and it does not bear good memories and in many cases people in prostitution would get rid of it very quickly and spend it on stuff they don't need.