Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. – Bertrand Russell
I recently stumbled on this article at Wired Magazine and was immediately impressed with the incredible stupidity and ignorance of its author, who apparently believes that if he watches one flock of pigeons in one city for a while he can safely make pronouncements about swallows in Capistrano, hawks in Africa and Adelie penguins in Antarctica. Even with all my experience I hesitate to make general statements about all hookers everywhere, but Sudhir Venkatesh doesn’t; after talking to a bunch of streetwalkers and low-end escorts who used to be streetwalkers in New York City, he apparently considers himself expert enough to make pronouncements about “sex workers” in general. This article has to be seen to be believed, but I warn regular readers that the only part which won’t have your jaw dropping in astonishment is the angry commentary from real whores below the main article. So, I’ll just cover some of the highlights.
What is it like to be a prostitute? The answer depends on whether you work out of a client’s car or a $500-a-night hotel room. In 1999, I set out to study the effects of efforts to bring the suburban middle class back to New York City. The gentrification of Times Square made for a unique social experiment: What happens to sex workers when they are pushed off the streets and into the outer boroughs? I had little idea at the time that I’d be documenting the rise of an entirely new, upper-end “indoor” market, in which streetwalkers have given way to a professional class. The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and “wellness” goods. In the process, “dating,” “massage,” “escort,” and “dancing” have replaced hustling and streetwalking. A luxury brand has been born. These changes have made sex for hire more expensive. But luxe pricing has in turn helped make prostitution, well… somewhat respectable. Whereas men once looked for a secretive tryst, now they seek a mistress with no strings attached, a “girlfriend experience,” and they are willing to pay top dollar for it.
Let this sink in for a moment. Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia, has apparently never heard of courtesans and seems to sincerely believe that upscale prostitution, stripping and massage parlors were all born in the past decade in New York City. This represents such profound historical and sociological ignorance it literally boggles the mind. The next paragraph is more of the same:
Technology has played a fundamental role in this change. No self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light. The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue. As the trade has grown less risky and more lucrative, it has attracted some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income.
Undoubtedly, the rise of the internet has made it a lot easier for girls to be completely independent, but even agency girls are independent contractors and there were personals ads and referral services long before the internet was invented. The internet has also allowed girls who might once have worked the street to inexpensively advertise to a wider audience and stay more safely indoors while doing so. In this one respect, his findings aren’t far off-base; the problem arises when he attempts to extrapolate information gleaned from streetwalkers and ex-streetwalkers (“I followed 290 women, 170 of whom made enough (at least $30,000) to separate them from streetwalkers”) to the entire sex worker population. And his bizarre assertion that high-end prostitution is a product of computers and cell phones would certainly surprise Phryne, Theodora, Mata Hari, Madame Pompadour or even Josie Arlington.
After interviewing 120 streetwalkers and 170 low-end escorts ($30,000 a year is very low-end, especially in New York) Venkatesh feels confident enough to pronounce that “escorts” (not low-end escorts, all escorts) earn about 50 percent more per transaction than streetwalkers (after saying the latter make about $75 per transaction), are “beaten twice a year, on average,” and “keep working to pay for clothing and shoes.” Just a bit of perspective here: In New Orleans (a cheaper market than New York) during the time period of the study agency escorts charged an average of $300 (of which they kept $200) and independents $200, and I never met a girl who was literally beaten by a client, ever. And I guess they’ve never heard of things like “rent”, “food”, “gasoline”, “electricity bills” and “children” up at Columbia. He also declares that independent escorts “have to” pay for drugs for clients, which is as amazingly stupid an assertion as any in this mess; it would be a foolish escort indeed who agreed to bring drugs to a client since the very request screams “cop”, and the idea that she would pay for such out of her own pocket leads me to believe that some of these girls were pulling Venkatesh’s leg.
It just goes downhill from there; we are told that nearly all escorts have a day job (in reality a minority do), that a boob job will increase earning potential about 50% (obviously he’s never heard of “spinners”), and that bottle-blondes make more money (they don’t; I got just as many requests for brunettes). “Caitlyn” sold this sucker on the idea that mid-range escorts spend $2000 per month on shoes, and he somehow got the notion that a girl with four regulars making $80,000 a year is “high-end” in New York. The professor says all sex workers (even, apparently, strippers and PSOs) “always” carry two cell phones because “Guys sometimes grab a woman’s mobile to gain a sense of power and control” (perhaps that happens to New York streetwalkers from time to time, but I’ve never heard of it) and that “If the client wants to skip the condom, there’s usually a 25 percent surcharge” (no, there’s usually a boot out the door for such a request, and even among desperate street girls or semi-pros who agree to it there’s no “usual” charge because desperation is not a predictable thing). But in the end, he reveals his methodological flaws in spades: though 61% of his interviewees had used Craigslist at one time or another, according to his graphs only 8-15% advertised via “personal referral or other”, with that “other” containing every other means of internet advertising including Backpage, Eros, personal websites, review boards, etc, etc, etc…in other words, his “study” ignored somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of the whores in New York.
The only remotely interesting thing about the study (outside of its author’s capacity for self-delusion) is that he claims to have encountered 290 streetwalkers and low-end escorts but only 11 pimps. Considering that like most people he was probably predisposed to overestimate the percentage of girls with pimps the number is a tantalizingly low 3.8%; unfortunately his worthless methodology renders even that number unusable, which is too bad because otherwise it would’ve been a great statistic to quote.
This is what passes for modern thought.
1) Form a conclusion
2) Hie forth in search of facts to prove it
3) Announce your brilliantly proven social theory to all.
From the Wired article:
Yeah, because she’s very probably a cop. And while we’re on the topic of self-respect, I would have to say that a cop who is standing at a traffic light with the intention of tricking some guy into committing a crime so the state can ruin his life, break up his family, and traumatize his children is so morally inferior to even the sleaziest hooker that she doesn’t even deserve to breath the same air.
Yes, I know that was a little off topic, but the thought popped into my head and I had to excise it before it metastasized and killed me.
Hallelujah and amen, brother! 🙂
Well, Dave, that’s called “entrapment”, whether it’s a cop pretending to be a hooker or Ef-Bee-Eye personnel encouraging or fooling young Muz-lim men into killing.
Any person in any kind of authority, or any person doing it on TV for entertainment, who is encouraging or fooling people into breaking the law should be guilty of breaking the law themselves. Period.
On the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC is inscribed the motto, “A government of laws, not of men.” Entrapment makes that a lie because certain men (cops and other government operatives) are allowed to break the laws in order to lure others into doing so. Solicitation for prostitution, selling drugs, etc are all CRIMES, but government operatives are allowed to do them in order to trick others into breaking the corresponding laws against buying those goods or services. That is government by MEN, not by rule of law, because laws must apply equally to everyone, beggar and king, or else they are invalid.
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and this man is a prize-winning sociologist… this piece was ranted about on email lists last week for a long list of sins. the one that has made headlines is the claim that sex workers have moved to advertising on facebook, as though having a page there and being a sex worker meant advertising there. and as though some enormous percentage of the US population had not opened a facebook page.
given that wired is a technology rage it’s odd beepers, answering machines and answering services were not mentioned.
but my own vote for the best line in the non-article is ‘I followed 290 women for a year’.
Laura, thanks for weighing in with a social scientist’s perspective on this dork.
😀
I’m glad to see it was at least ranted about in the e-mail list. I have the impression this is what happens when a scientist decides to write a popular piece: he does it for the attention.
Oh, there may be some of his numbers that are meaningful and deserve consideration. But with a non-article like this… it’s difficult to know which ones. Or how many. Or…
Sad, indeed. (And then the human and social sciences wonder why they get such bad PR in the physical and biological sciences!…)
Sounds like a guy who
(a) didn’t review the literature (prostitution has a biiig history, in and out of academia)
(b) didn’t plan his statistics well (he thought that a target population can just be numbered, and that’s all)
(c) allowed a number of anecdotes to guide his interpretation of his numbers.
There are indeed such people doing sociological research in other fields. They tend to be despised by better researchers, who do know a thing or two about statistics and who do read on the literature before entering a new field. Maybe there’s a reason why this guy was published in Wired, rather than in a scientific journal.
We certainly need better research…
But the field (prostitution) is so titillating (in many senses) that the media wants to run away and make big claims to get readership. That certainly doesn’t help academics actually discuss and criticize each other to consensus. The fact that I work in a field — historical linguistics — that is of little interest to the outside world is sometimes a blessing. Since most people don’t really care about Nostratic one way or another, specialists can publish arguments and counterarguments, organize conferences, and slowly improve their ideas without the annoying factor of a big media hype distorting things every time someone proposes a new idea.
just to say, i am not an authentic social scientist by any stretch of the imagination. i just learned how to do it and therefore can critique it, which anyone can do. they claim they use methodology? ok, ask what it was, where it is described. they say they have to pass an ethics review board? let’s see the details on that. but this piece, which i insist is not an ‘article’, is more like a decorative party game than anything else.
These would be any sane researcher’s first questions, Ms Agustín. Hell, ethics review boards give us linguists hell for simply recording word lists and short narratives in indigenous languages! The endless and ultimately rather pointless forms, “ownership of the data”, and all that — probably quite relevant for other fields and endeavors, but in most cases absolutely immaterial to linguists — are formidable. What do they say about work like this?
He does give a few details about his methodology (“I gained their trust so they would see I wasn’t a cop or social worker”; “I started out with questions about income so they would feel their status as workers was being validated”; etc.); but that’s ridiculously insufficient. Is there going to be an article in a more serious journal, or is this just a scientist trying to look ‘cool’ and ‘popular’ by publishing the kind of thing that more popular media like Wired would publish? Did he do it spontanously, or was it Wired‘s idea — they wanted someone’s take on how new electronic devices have affected “the oldest profession”?
Hell, if that’s all they wanted they should’ve contacted Amanda Brooks; she could’ve given them a much more interesting article which would have also had the advantage of being true.
I certainly agree. Could it be they didn’t know about her? It’s this visibility thing: if a publication that sometimes wants to be edgy like Wired wanted an article on such a risqué topic, they might simply not know who to ask; and the idea of actually asking a prostitute (certainly the people at Wired would know how to find them on the internet? :-)) might, for cultural reasons, simply not have occurred to them…
Cultural reasons, my rear end; more like editorial reasons. I’ll bet more than one Wired staffer reads hooker blogs and knows damned well who to ask, but management decreed otherwise.
Over the last three years, I’ve corresponded with two call girls. Both were politically aware, promoted causes, and had above-average educations.
Therefore I conclude that every hooker in the world has a degree and cares about the poor in India.
Congratulations! You’re now a social scientist. If you’ll give me your address I’ll mail you your diploma and accreditations, Mr Barsoom! You can now go on and write serious papers about how Martians are infiltrating Hollywood. 😉
Sometimes I wish Martians were infiltrating Hollywood.
he is a sociologist, he does research, he publishes. he is the second author on a couple of articles, meaning a research assistant did (a lot of) the work. my complaint about the wired piece is not that he is lying or doesn’t know anything, but that, in the interests of cuteness, he doesn’t explain things adequately, or the numbers, or give key details. it may be an editor’s fault that all the statements are so general, but venkatesh has in the end permitted a raft of misleading statements to be made that make this look like more than a small study. it would not have taken up much space to print an explanatory paragraph. it’s sociology, but it’s cheap and cheesy.
I also suspect, judging by some of his claims, that a lot of these girls saw him as a wide-eyed nerd who just fell off the turnip truck and figured they could have some fun telling him stupid stories (like standardized surcharges for bareback full service and $2000 monthly shoe budgets) to see if he’d believe them; the ones who saw this article are probably laughing their arses off at his credulity.
Informal poll: Fellow working girls, did you also feel our little sisters in Gotham were being less than honest with the professor?
i doubt he was the one doing much of the talking, he may not even have been there. the first authors/research assistants would have done that. these articles are published, if anyone wants to see them. the one that describes new york gives detailed methodology but not the number of people spoken with, which i consider odd but it got past the journal’s reviewers so must not be. i have one of these if you want to see it but i need a non-earthlink address to send it back to you.
I’m going to ask my husband today to help me set up a Yahoo address to bounce it from; let’s see if that works. 🙂
Ms Agustín, I would like to see them. Where were they published? Do you have a link?
I guess I’ve never heard of ‘spinners’ either.
And I’ve been trying to figure out what PSO might stand for, but I can’t come up with anything.
A “spinner” is a very tiny, thin girl; the word comes from the joke that a man can pick her up and spin her around on his penis (in cowgirl position).
PSO = Porn Star Experience; very energetic, very visual and very “dirty”.
I did a column on these terms and many others.
Pretty sure PSO is usually the acronym for Phone Sex Operator, since Porn Star Experience would be PSE.
Oops! Can’t believe I missed that! Obviously I was on autopilot when I answered that!
I’m laughing my ass off here XD
That article reads like it was written by a school boy who wants to impress the teacher with his “extensive” vocabulary without using words so big as to intimidate her and praises “the boon of technology” to high heaven, extolling its virtues. Obviously dear Venkatesh (or whoever he assigned to write that) got his primary education in India. I recognise that telltale word choice from the Indian brand of English. The noob has a Wikipedia page but it doesn’t mention his childhood at all. It goes straight from “born in India” to “Philadelphia Univ in 1988.” Some might say that that’s unimportant but I feel that one’s childhood is very telling.
He’s not even actually a social scientist in the true sense (he has a BA in mathematics. MATHEMATICS! He probably saw the immensely small scope in the field & switched to something that can make him oodles & boodles of money). He’s just a guy with a head for numbers and knows how to make ’em look pretty, has just about okay language skills, can say “I have a DEGREE, so I know better than you,” because sadly someone did give him a degree, and saw the potential profit in publishing pseudo-sociological research in a book meant for mass-publication (HAVE YOU SEEN HIS LIST OF BOOKS? Clearly he just came across the sample hoe population for this “study” while “researching” for his books on drug gangs and public housing projects and worked from there so obviously he worked streetwalker-up, judging by the ‘per-act’ break-up of charges, and didn’t actually reach the upper tiers coz he had enough material to justify generalization). He’s just riding on the sheer tantalizing nature of the topic to spout seemingly well-researched and accurate (due to its intricate nature) nonsense and gain publicity. Who wants to read about homeless hobos when they can read about the hoe next door?
This is the Chetan Bhagat of sociological literature. 🙂