This essay first appeared in Cliterati on July 20th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
All week long I collect sex-work-related news stories for my Saturday “That Was the Week That Was” news columns, and when I prepare the columns each item is filed under a subtitle which refers back to a previous post. But as I explained in “Case Study”, “every once in awhile a story comes along which is so interesting, funny, horrible, odd or whatever, that I like to analyze it at length.” This is one of those stories, and my attention was attracted to it by two things: one, that it was difficult to fit into only one heading; and two, that there’s so much ignorance here one almost has to admire the journalist’s dedication to spreading misinformation. After all, she could have obtained nearly all the information she needed from the two activists she interviewed; instead, she chose to shove their input to corners of the article and instead concentrate on the pronouncements of a clownish cop and a self-important academic (whom I’ve criticized on several occasions for his dopey assumptions). Author Jessica Guynn wastes no time, starting off with monumentally dumb statements from the very beginning:
For years, sex workers have been the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley that no one talks about. But…the sex industry has been closely linked to boom times in the Bay Area going back to the Gold Rush…
That it’s the San Francisco Bay Area is neither here nor there; every place there are men with money to spend, there will be sex workers for them to spend it on. Guynn seems to imagine herself an intrepid investigative reporter exposing some hidden scandal; I’m sure she thought it clever to intersperse sentences about the mundane doings of sex workers with those describing recent anti-sex worker pogroms and the overdose death of a Google executive, no doubt hoping the latter two would lend some lurid spice to the rather dry meat of the former. And even when she’s dealing with basic, easily-checked facts, the “pimps and hos” mythology she learned from cops (or television, or other equally-ill-informed sources) seems to interfere with her ability to transcribe them; when the story first appeared she referred to the screening service Preferred 411 as “Preferred911”, and even in the corrected story she portrays it as an escort service directory (with obligatory scare quotes around the perfectly ordinary word “escort”) rather than what it is, a screening service and ad platform. I’m sure activist Siouxsie Q (the first source quoted herein) could’ve thoroughly explained P411 to Guynn, but instead she quickly turns to Scott Cunningham, who might actually be able to turn out good research if he’d consult sex workers instead of proceeding from his own wholly-erroneous preconceptions:
Scott Cunningham, an associate professor at Baylor University who studies the economics of prostitution, said the Internet has made the sex trade “extraordinarily efficient,” taking it from the streets and red-light districts to home computers and smartphones.
This is the fundamental flaw in Cunningham’s work: he believes (and has repeatedly stated) that prior to the internet, the majority of whores worked on the street; all of his studies are based on this fallacy. Street workers have never been the majority at any point in history, and under criminalized 20th-century conditions they represented 15% or less of American prostitutes. While it is true that some street workers moved indoors after the advent of the internet, the majority of internet-based escorts are those who used to work in hotels, take out ads in alternative papers or contract with escort services (which largely advertised in phone books). But Cunningham insists on comparing apples to oranges, resulting in strikingly-wrong statements like, “Before the Internet, clients didn’t know where to find the prostitutes and prostitutes did not know where to find the clients.” That’s news to me, and to every other sex worker who did quite well in pre-internet times; I can assure Professor Cunningham that my clients had no trouble whatsoever finding me, and the idea that hookers had trouble finding clients seems to proceed from another ridiculous and false assumption: that clients are only a small subset of all men.
The belief in a lost era of woebegone streetwalkers crying plaintively in the night for rare and elusive clients (and its counterpart, the creed of the magical whore-multiplying powers of the internet) is also clearly evident in the statements of Sgt. Kyle Oki of the San Jose Police Department Human Trafficking Task Force (formerly known as the San Jose vice squad), who said “prostitutes are gravitating to the Internet because they can charge clients they find there more money for the same sex acts”. This is a fine example of the principle of Garbage In, Garbage Out; Oki proceeds from a set of faulty assumptions, and authoritatively states a conclusion which is literally the exact opposite of the truth: because the internet makes it easier for amateurs to place ads, cheapskates can more easily find cut-rate girls and established ones must either charge less or do more to compete, or else resign themselves to less business. In other words, contrary to Oki’s blather, most prostitutes find that because of the internet they can charge clients less money for the same sex acts. In 2000, the going rate in New Orleans was $300 per hour, above the national average; though it’s still possible for an established lady to get that, $300 buys a lot less than it did 14 years ago. And in some areas (such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles) the bottom has almost dropped out of what was once a very lucrative market.
The rest of the article suffers from the same syndrome that permeates all of prostitution law and much of the public’s conception of sex work: the fallacious belief that sex is different from all other human activity, and sex work different from all other work. Would a reporter find the idea that any other entrepreneur had grossed almost $1 million over several years of brisk business remarkable? Of course not, but somehow it becomes so when the entrepreneur is a sex worker (I also doubt Guynn would use the demeaning word “servicing” to describe the work of a landscaper, chef, masseuse or therapist, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day). And then there’s this line: “One sex worker [said] she uses credit-card payment processor Square to charge clients…” to which any normal person’s response should be, “So what?” How many businesses have you run into lately that don’t take credit cards? Accepting credit cards is not remotely notable, for sex workers or anyone else, and it hasn’t been for at least two decades; the fact that a businesswoman uses a popular payment processor doesn’t make it any more interesting. But that’s par for the course with mainstream articles on sex work; rather than discuss important issues like sex worker rights, police brutality and how “authorities” use the moral panic around “sex trafficking” to justify massive violations of human rights, reporters prefer to present dry-as-dust details that they portray as somehow shocking because the transaction involves sex, then liberally moisten the mixture with lies, myths and sexual fantasies from self-appointed “experts” who know less about sex work than they do about quantum physics.
Maggie, I think that most reporters are just simply ignorant of the issues that affect sex workers. They take police statements as fact and don’t research the subject. All it takes is a little searching on the Internet to find sites like yours and from other sex workers to see what is really going on but this is too much research for them to bother with. Not only this but reporters also are influenced by the media and they just follow along with the standard narrative.
I agree and I want to add that many of the “reporters” getting exposure via the Internet these days used to write for the worst of the worst publications that often made stories up entirely. I don’t think the quality of reporting has gone down, actually, but that it just has become more visible how bad at their job most reporters are. The “scoop” is more important than its accuracy.
An example just quite recently in the press was the story of the vet that had to get a new $75’000 iPad-configured prosthetic hand because his iPad was stolen and only this one iPad would work with the device. Almost all reporters reporting on that story were to stupid to recognize that this would be exceedingly stupid design and exceedingly unlikely to be true. Yet they did run with the sob-story of the violated veteran instead of doing minimal fact-checking. Of course it turned out that at most this person had lost some of his configuration settings.
That is not to say the “reporting” on sex-work is not utterly demented, but a lot of what “reporters” write is. It is not just fabrication, but _bad_ fabrication. I think the reporting on sex-work is just an indicator of how bad things have become as they are even worse (as far as possible) for that than generally. But apparently, this despicable and repulsive way to execute their profession pays the bills and apparently there are enough reporters that do not care how much harm they do.
From the context of what was said, shouldn’t it be “$300 buys a lot more than it did 14 years ago”?
I meant a lot less groceries, fuel, electricity, rent, etc.
Apparently, you have to pay about $415 for what cost $300 in 2000, according to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
As a sort-of luxury good, sex work is likely to be hit hard by any economic difficulties and hence can suffer far more.
I think we’re following the “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra, somehow trying to make the ordinary salacious. The industry has been been around at least since 2400 BCE (longer probably, but got to go by what’s documented) and there’s seven billion people on the planet, which indicates at least seven billion sex acts done in recent memory minimum. Yet somehow we still have hang-ups on the subject. Barring autonomic systems like breathing, there’s four things I *have* to do: eat, sleep, defecate, and fornicate. I can go buy a meal, buy a room to sleep in, and both places have lavatories too so three of the four urges are satisfied and two of them I paid for in a honest and legal exchange. But once I have the urge for sex, that for some reason has to be exempt from economic rules because that’s wrong. Mind you, going to a nightclub and plopping a ten spot on the counter and directing the barkeeper to get the redhead at the end of the bar a drink and the rest is his, doing a little conversation and dancing then hooking up and having sex with a woman I haven’t known for literally more than three hours and will never see again, *that’s* just fine. Dropping $200 and skipping the dance session (even though it produces the same result) *that’s wrong*. And the media plays along.
Ah, my favourite (neo)impressionist artist 🙂
May I ask a question. Why do you think prostitution is illegal. If it was up to me it wouldn’t be. What’s wrong with a woman making a living the way she wants to do. It should not be illegal in my opinion x
Like any other restrictive trade policy the goal is to hinder competition and drive up prices for the benefit of special interest groups.
The mainstream-religions seem to be extremely scared of sex for some reason. It is unclear to my where that comes from, but it seems to be at the root of these evil machinations. It may be part of a general “anti-fun” agenda by said religions that want you to only have fun in prayer and in vanquishing its enemies.
The August 9th issue of the Economist had an article stating that professional sex providers–particularly escorts–had seen a loss in income per customer over the last five years. http://www.economist.com/printedition/2014-08-09
That is in both the U.S. and Europe.
Without a doubt the internet has made it possible for an influx of part-timers competing for customers to leave the impression of an across the board reduction in revenue but those who specialize and offer the most comprehensive customer service will always command the best prices.
“The belief in a lost era of woebegone streetwalkers crying plaintively in the night for rare and elusive clients (and its counterpart, the creed of the magical whore-multiplying powers of the internet)”
Sex workers have had ways of finding respectable clients probably since pre-history. I would suspect that most courtesans throughout history have worked indoors.
Our supposedly “liberated” society continues its astoundingly schizophrenic attitudes towards sex and sex workers. You are able to give away sex for free, you can also barter or extort with it, as in marriage. You can even perform it on camera for money. But for some bizarre reason that no one understands, you are not allowed to sell it like any other service. It’s like a porn industry run by puritans.
And people think God has no sense of humor.
Sorry, I am feeling very cynical today.
Fourteen years ago, a gallon of milk (here in CO) was $1.79, a pound of ground round was $2.89, and a loaf of good bread was $1.59. Today, everything is about 2/3rds higher. My rent was $700 per month in a middle class neighborhood for a two bedroom apartment; same apartment today, $1000+.
Prices on basic items have not gone down, only on “luxuries.” Decent computer that’ll run the latest version of Windows: in 2000 $900 for a tower, $1100 for a laptop; today $550 for a tower, $400 for a laptop.
” though it’s still possible for an established lady to get that, $300 buys a lot less than it did 14 years ago”
Don’t you mean “more”? If prices have gone down, then you can buy more with the same amount.
I mean what I wrote. Remember, I think like a whore, not like a client; $300 buys a lot less groceries, fuel, rent, etc.
Oh. Yep – inflation, cost of living, cost of doing business. What with every second 20-year-old passably attractive young woman on the internet turning tricks for spare change, will the Courtesan go the way of the buggy-whip industry and the bookshop?
Meh – who knows.
Nope. Men have always paid more for quality and always will. The ones who suffer aren’t the courtesan types, but the mid-range ladies, who have to work harder to establish a reputation so they can continue to command the prices they used to get without tremendous effort.
Hi Maggie, just wanted to clarify a few statements that you make. First, can you help me find where I have stated that the majority of sex work was on streets prior to the Internet? In my paper with Todd Kendall “Risk Behaviours among Internet-facilitated sex workers: evidence from two new datasets” (2010 Sexually Transmitted Infections article), I say the exact opposite:
“Recent estimates indicate that <20% of transactions in the USA take place in the traditional outdoors environment."
I cite Ronald Weitzer's 2005 article "New Directions in Research on Prostitution" for this claim.
As for the evidence that the Internet has played some role in the decline in street prostitution, here's what Todd Kendall and I wrote in the abstract of our 2011 article "Prostitution 2.0" (link here): “we find that workers who solicit online largely represent growth in the overall prostitution market, as opposed to simple displacement of the off-line, street-focused market, although we find sizable displacement effects among sex workers in their 30s and 40s.”
You can find similar such claims made. My research has largely suggested that the Internet has disrupted traditional street markets, and not merely displaced those streetwalkers by sorting them indoors. That comes up repeatedly in my writings.
Finally, you note that I rely on my preconceptions as opposed to learning about sex work from sex workers themselves. This is as I understand your claim incorrect, though. The Survey for Adult Service Providers (SASP) was a labor market survey that Todd Kendall and I fielded from 2008 to 2009 for Internet-facilitated sex workers. Our sample from which we culled the emails and phone numbers was The Erotic Review, which we used to construct sample weights so that the SASP sample was representative of the TER population itself. Around 685 sex workers ultimately took the survey over the 11-month period of time. Along with the quantitative survey results, I also interviewed anywhere from a dozen to two dozen sex workers over the phone and by email — precisely because I have no prior knowledge about sex work except for what I have learned from this research project. You can read about the SASP data in this Handbook chapter, as well as the other articles and working papers available on my website.
As for my theories about the effect of the internet on American sex worker markets, how it augmented the market, changed coordination points (“focal points“), and caused word-of-mouth mechanisms to be more broadly adopted — I would suggest insofar as you can to study my published writings on it. It seems like at least some of what you have found objectionable has been the way that statements I made to a journalist was used in their article. I can only say to you on this point that I have no control over what a journalist says. And if I have been sloppy in the way I word things, I’m more than happy to be shown and I will definitely make an effort to make my public statements more in line with my public academic writings on the subject. The challenge of communicating research in a succinct way to journalists is an art form I have yet to master, and in many ways, have no interest in mastering.
My main point in writing is just to simply help you know where you have made factual mistakes. Hopefully this post can help clarify some of the misconceptions.
sincerely,
Scott Cunningham
I’m very pleased that you’ve responded, Dr. Cunningham; I really think our correspondence will help to clear up these misunderstandings.
Just a quick one last point of clarification. The USA Today article quoted me as saying “Before the Internet, clients didn’t know where to find the prostitutes and prostitutes did not know where to find the clients.”
Yet, all one has to do is read any of my published articles, in which I discuss pre-Internet prostitution, and it can help put into context what I was trying to convey to the journalist. Obviously since I have written about at least one form of pre-internet market (street prostitution), I can’t logically be saying that there was no way for markets to form prior to the Internet.
What I was explaining to the journalist at the USA Today was this: prostitution is a two-sided market. Two-sided markets have to solve certain key problems before exchanges can occur. In prohibited markets, Diego Gambetta has brought attention to he calls the “identification problem”. That is, in prohibited markets, like prostitution, all clients (and potential clients) have to figure out who sex workers are, and all sex workers have to figure out who the clients are. There are many ways in which prostitution markets have historically solved this problem — focal points, such as Red Light Districts and particular streets known for prostitution, can provide information to clients, for instance. These points of coordination have natural feedback effects too — clients want to search for sex workers to employ where they believe those sex workers will be, and vice versa. So there is a natural tendency for the coordination solution to be reinforcing. Other solutions include reputation-based mechanisms, screening and signaling devices, and so forth. I have written about this in published and unpublished works.
My point to the journalist was to say that in many developed markets, solutions to this fundamental problem existed already. But prior to the internet not all markets had sufficient numbers of market participants for the markets to form. Not all markets had classified advertising newspapers, like the Providence Phoenix, for instance. And in some locations, the stigma and sanctions associated with prostitution were larger and added additional frictions. When there are too few market participants, markets may fail to form — something Alvin Roth has called a problem of insufficient thickness.
So, what I was attempting to explain to the journalist was both the idea of the coordination problem itself that all markets (not just sex markets, but all markets) have to overcome, and how even more difficult prohibition makes that. Coordination is ultimately about information, and so the kinds of coordination solutions that have come because of the Internet have been very important for augmenting this market. And so I also tried to explain some of that to the journalist. When I said “before the internet, clients didn’t know where to find the prostitutes” and vice versa — I was explicitly talking to the journalist about the many new markets that have formed because of the Internet. The Internet substantially reduces the risk of arrest and detection and thus any stigmas associated with being a client or a provider are reduced in expectation. Not surprisingly, we should expect that if the expected costs of some activity falls, then those individuals most sensitive to those costs will sort into the sector. And it’s those clients and sex workers — people who would never use a street to find one another, or who maybe wouldn’t have wanted to work through an escort agency either, now can do so.
I can elaborate more on this. I may be wrong on this theory, but I am pointing it out because whatever the correctness of the theory is, it’s not the same as the way you have presented it above. I have no doubt that many of my hypotheses are incorrect, though.
I feel it’s important to point out that this was written a couple of months ago, before our recent correspondence. I’ll definitely be getting back to you after I get home this week.