Learning. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
What drives so many economists to write half-witted, misinformed papers about sex work? Clearly, these aren’t stupid people, and one would imagine it would be impossible to get through graduate school without some understanding of the basics of research; some of them even seem motivated by a genuine (and laudable) desire to explore the facts about prostitution rather than simply accepting anti-whore dogma. So why do most of them choose to ignore the ample research which already exists and eschew interviewing any of the many sex worker activists who can be found with a simple Google search? Barely a week goes by that I don’t get emails from reporters, academics, lawyers and others with questions about the topic, and I’m only one of dozens who could clear up these scholars’ misconceptions before they even start…yet they prefer to ignore us and make asses of themselves instead. In just the past year we’ve seen Yeoman and Mars’ “sex robot” nonsense and Lee & Persson’s horrible combination of the Swedish & Nevada models, both of which reveal a total lack of interdisciplinary research by accepting “sex trafficking” hysteria as factual; we also saw that gypsy-whore foolishness from Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall, based on the fallacious notion that escort ads are in 1:1 correspondence with the number of hookers in an area. And now here comes Cunningham again, quoted in an appallingly-inaccurate Daily Beast article based in part on another paper he and Kendall wrote in 2009:
Once upon a time, becoming a prostitute was difficult. In, say, 1992, you could risk your life as a streetwalker—if you lived near a street where one could walk provocatively and reasonably expect to find customers. You could make and place an ad for sexual services in your local alternative weekly, at least if you lived in a city—but the responses wouldn’t begin until well after said weekly was printed and distributed. Of course, there were brothels, massage parlors, agencies, and so on back then, even an escorts section of the yellow pages. But it wasn’t as if any 20-year-old with a flash of curiosity about sex work could within hours find a client or a pimp and go into business selling herself…
The idiocy starts right from the get-go, and though we can’t blame Cunningham for author Gregory Gilderman’s use of the grating phrase “selling herself” or his casual assertion of the “all whores have pimps” myth, it seems his paper is the source of the patently-false belief (which any veteran 20th century hooker can debunk) that picking up a phone and calling an escort service out of the yellow pages was somehow harder or slower than setting up an online ad oneself.
…“When you take the profile of Internet prostitutes versus street prostitutes, you find there’s more education, and that more work temporarily, then exit,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist…who has studied the impact of the Internet on prostitution markets. “They also are significantly less likely to work for a pimp.” [They]…even look different…[Cunningham] found that when Craigslist first entered a new area…the body weight of the women advertising sex gradually shifted to, in his words, “a more athletic body type. It moves from less attractive to more attractive in the eyes of the john”…the Internet…hasn’t merely moved online and indoors those who once worked the street, but…created a different sort of sex worker—more educated, younger—and a bigger market of women selling sexual services in the United States and men purchasing those services…
Though Cunningham starts with two true statements (albeit the second is dramatically understated), he then compares internet escorts to streetwalkers (rather than to pre-internet agency girls) and assumes that the statements of weight in ads are truthful. Gilderman runs with that, immediately reiterating the fallacy that before the internet most hookers were streetwalkers and making the factually-unsupported statement that prostitution is more widespread now than in the ‘90s. It gets worse; next he seems to claim that there were escort reviews on Craigslist, that a man could somehow use it to screen girls, and (most incredibly of all) that ads on Craigslist were more reliable than those on escort review boards:
…in the pre-Internet era…there was simply no practical way for a man to compare the looks and prices of large numbers of escorts, anonymously contact them, and receive reliable information that a provider was, in fact, not working for the police. Craigslist changed that…there had always been sex ads on the Internet…but their presence on Craigslist was something like the difference between a brothel on a side street in the bad part of town and a brothel in the Mall of America…sex work for women between ages 20 and 40 has mostly shifted from an outdoor activity involving street walking to an indoor activity involving online solicitation and communication. Second, because is it much easier to buy and sell sex, there are simply more prostitutes, and clients, than there were before…
As I’ve stated many times, streetwalkers have always been a minority of whores in every era of human history, and since the advent of modern anti-whore laws a century ago they’ve been a relatively small minority in most places. The internet has indeed caused some outdoor workers to move indoors, but the shrinkage was from about 15% of the whore population working the street to perhaps 8-10% doing so; it was hardly the seismic shift that reporters and ill-informed academics keep representing it as. Furthermore, if prostitution has indeed increased in the past 20 years (and I have never seen any credible evidence that it has), it would merely be a rebound toward normal levels from a probable low in the 1970s due to the high availability of “free” sex at the time. Kinsey found that 69% of men in the 1940s had paid for sex at least once in their lives, and though the tendency of more recent studies to generate lower numbers is due partly to poor question design and partly to underreporting due to increased social stigma since the 1980s, it’s certainly possible and even likely that the increased availability of “free” sex had some impact. There’s an historical precedent: during the Victorian Era nearly every middle- or upper-class man saw whores occasionally, and there were many more of them; roughly 5.5% of the female population in a typical 19th-century European or American city worked in the trade at any given time, as opposed to less than 0.3% today. But as more women entered the industrial workforce in the 1910s and 1920s and premarital sex became far more socially acceptable over the same period, both the number of prostitutes and the demand for their services began to drop to today’s unusually-low level.
Turning back to the article, we see it descend into the usual blather about business migrating to Backpage after the closure of Craigslist’s “erotic services” section, where we find this stunningly obtuse statement:
…But while the bulk of the business moved to Backpage, some of the listings that had appeared on Craigslist simply disappeared—strongly suggesting that Craigslist hadn’t merely picked up the listings that previously were in print or scattered around the Web, but had actually increased the size of the market…
The listings didn’t “disappear”; they simply moved back to the personals and personal services sections they inhabited before Craigslist was forced by the first wave of government interference to create the “erotic services” section in the first place. But since that fact doesn’t fit the theory that the evil internet is tempting innocent women into harlotry, Maier’s Law demands it be ignored.
The rest of the article is mostly the usual lurid fluff; Gilderman pretends TER is the only escort review site, accuses Village Voice Media of only questioning “trafficking” hysteria in order to protect its profits, then quotes from two reluctant hookers (one of them Rachel Lloyd of GEMS) in order to ensure that the readers get the message that sex work is bad, and that “even part-time sex work with apparently harmless men can take its toll.” That’s to be expected from a hack outfit like The Daily Beast, but I just wish there weren’t so many academic ignoramuses around to give them ammunition.
There might be four things increasing prostitution in the USA if it is increasing. One would be this economic downturn in which women are seeking to sell sexual services in order to pay the bills which they are having a harder time doing lately. Second, the internet may make it more difficult for the police to catch the whores and johns. Third, men aren’t getting as much “free sex” these days from amatuer women as men in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Four, maybe sex work such as stripper and possibly whores for women and a man’s association as being a customer as far as the stigmatization is decreasing. I’m not sure I believe any of the above, but the above ideas are worth pondering.
You did a great job telling him that streetwalking and having pimps is and has been for at least a while a very low percentage of prostitution.
24-hours after I email you the survey draft there’s an article on bad surveys. I hope I wasn’t an inspiration, Maggie! 🙂
I really like this article, in part because it highlights something that comes across in the sex work research literature; researchers in this field seem disproportionately likely to draw conclusions well beyond the scope and design of their studies. There’s a bias to this effect in every field as every academic wishes their latest study were just slightly better/more interesting than it likely is. But in sex work, this effect gets massively dialed up. A small sample of street workers recruited from a drug rehab program are treated as implicitly or defacto representative of the industry as a whole; no one even feels the need to say, “obviously our study isn’t representative” in the limitations section (standard practice in every other field when this is the case).
I’ve got a hundred PDFs on my hard drive from my lit search, and only a few are what I would consider good/excellent in quality. These aren’t exceptional studies, really, it’s just that they apply methods standard to every other field to sex work and draw conclusions more or less in line with their methods and data.
On a related note, I came across a neat study looking at predictors of support for criminalization in Norway vs. Sweden. “What explains attitudes toward prostitution?” (2009) by Jakobsson and Kotsadam might be of interest to you, Maggie.
Definitely not; I wrote this a week ago! I only wish there were few enough of these bad studies that I could ignore them, but unfortunately there are so many of them, and they get such extensive press whenever they appear, that it’s important to point out their huge problems as an example.
BTB, I haven’t had a chance to look at the your survey yet; I’m pretty swamped and trying to catch up, so it’ll probably be over the weekend if that’s OK.
Like I said in the email, there’s no hurry. It’s all still in the planning phase; I’ve shopped out the same draft I sent you to a few potential academic collaborators so right now I’m just reviewing the feedback as it dribbles in.
There is a long history of researchers (reform minded and otherwise) discounting any information provided by those ‘in the field’ as it were. I believe it’s part of the general elitism and arrogance that educated, self-labeled elites are prone to, often quite unconsciously. “We know better than you, and we know more of what you need than you do.” Sometimes this is correct; but more often than is admitted, it stems from a desire to exert power over others. Presuming that legal adults are acting like children, and are unable to make rational decisions, is the first step in gaining power over their lives. It’s not just the sex industry that suffers from this presumption.
No, it’s not just the sex industry, it’s every pretty much everyone. It’s part of the government’s stock-in-trade to believe that all people are essentially children in need of supervision by the government.
I am an academic, and can confirm the great difficulty so many of us have in listening to information from the field. Even when we do go out and self-consciously try to “give voice to the voiceless”, it so often gets filtered through theoretical assumptions, selective informants, selective presentation, biased and misleading surveys, and inept interviews. The informants are not stupid, and quickly learn to either shut up or else say what the interviewers want to hear.
I don’t think it has much to do with the government, and only partly with elitism and power fantasies. Fears and insecurity about careers and the difficulties of making sense of complicated research results are just as important. And perhaps, most importantly, the tendency of all of us (not only elitist academics) to latch onto certain assumptions about the world; and then spend much of our life sifting, selecting and manipulating all of our experiences and sensory input to fit into those assumptions.
Ughhhhh…..
Annmarie (I think that was her name), the Educated Escort, was online with her own site years before Craigslist was even established. Many other escorts followed her. I was reading Belle du Jour’s, Postmodern Courtesan, and a couple other blogs way before I knew of Craigslist (although I don’t think it was around or it was very, very small). And I think the researchers gravitate to TER because it provides a larger amount of drama that can match with the prevailing stereotype of the sex industry more than any other board….which is why I don’t advertise there. It’s amazing how rarely Eros.com comes up; it’s never ECCIE or Open Adult Directory, etc.
And that line, “even part-time sex work with apparently harmless men can take its toll.” Okay, take out work and replace ‘men’ with boyfriend and it’d be questioned for its dramatics.
A complicated question you raise, a simple answer is for it : It`s politics and heteronormativity. I witnessed this with sexwork in media presentation and also when people search Polyamorists for Interviews. O participate in both subcultures and it`s everywhere the same: Sensation seeking stigmatizing content. Especially in newspapers they have rules what can be and can`t be published. I once gave an anonymous interview for an austrian newspaper to a journalist, who was a friend of mine. He could not publish it, because it was too much “pro-escorting” and the clients of the paper were left wing feminist housewives and what not. So only something that shows the dangers can be published. Congratulations.
I’ve thought about this a good deal, why ordinary people bevel such nonsense about the sex business, and this is what I’ve realized:
Most of us these days, lead over regulated, sanitized, boring lives, devoid of adventure and romance. We trudge from home to work cubicle to home, supervised, regulated, hectored all the way by some expert or boss who knows what’s best for us.
We desperately need the fantasy of someone out there who breaks free from all that. People always have. We used to tell tales of Princes and highway men, of Arthur and Robin Hood. They lived lives far beyond our mundane lives.
In the US, we published penny dreadfulls of the adventures of western outlaws like Billy the Kid, and read them voraciously, regardless of how far from the truth they were.
Everyone is interested in sex, regardless of how devoid their lives might be of it. Thus our fantasies about the sex business. The jet-setting call girl, making tonnes of money, constantly drinking champagne on yachts with billionaires in some lavish place or another serves one end of the fantasy spectrum, the unwilling sex slave, imprisoned by evil pimps, degraded, tortured serves another.
The Pimp represents Voldemort in this adult Harry Potter. The pimp in media has powers beyond all reason, is invisible, unstoppable, can move through walls and kidnap his victims from public places in broad daylight.
But of course, for society to flow along the courses most beneficial to the capitalist bosses, the lesson must be taught, that although these outlaws may flaunt every code of behaviour imposed on us, they get their just deserves in the end, they end up miserable, diseased, murdered.
No one wants the reality, that it’s all just a business, that the vast majority of those involved age out and go on to do other things, that most don’t make millions, ever had a pimp, or were kept as slaves. It’s just too boring.
The media keeps running the fantasy because it sells. It serves a deep need, a lust among humans for a richer, more colorful life. That desire won’t go away, so society has come up with a way to serve it up to us. Those too respectable to watch porn can still get their thrills reading lurid, unrealistic newspaper stories of call girl rings, and run away kids.
Thus, it’s an uphill battle, fighting this. No one wants the drear y truth getting in the way of a good story.
That’s a brilliant, excellent analysis; I’ve touched on the same idea a number of times, most thoroughly in “The Love-Hate Relationship” (where I compare mythic streetwalkers to mythic cowboys) and “Chupacabra“, which covers the myth of the magical mystery pimp.
Well. I’ve been called “brilliant” by Maggie. Thanks!
I’m so bright, my father calls me “son.”
(drops dunce hat on floor, does heel turn, smiles brightly…)
One bright spot: at least they’re starting to admit that most prostitutes are not streetwalkers NOW (though they still insist that it USED TO BE that way). So a little bit of reality is leaking in.
[…] another as some sort of mass migration; in the US, it is commonly claimed that indoor sex work was practically nonexistent before the advent of the internet, when in reality the change was from about 15% of all sex workers on the street to perhaps 10% or a […]