I’ve known countless sex workers. Call them what you will, “strippers”, “escorts”, “prostitutes”, “call girls”, whatever. There was a time in my life, many years ago, where I frequented many of these workers. It was a very dark time in my life and I’m happy to say it is well in my past.
However, I do have a fair bit of knowledge about the illicit sex trade operation. Yes, some women, who are very, very high scale and often educated, will seek such opportunites strictly as ways of benefitting their lives financially. But these women represent a tiny minority of all the pay-for-sex workers out there.
The vast majority of sex workers are driven to their profession out of desperation. And by desperation, I mean addiction. If I had to give a rather uneducated guess, I’d put percentages of sex workers who are compelled to their work out of drug addictions to be about 95% of all sex workers. And for the sake of this post, I am leaving out Asian massage parlors and the like, because I have no experience with this and this is more of a coercion into sex work issue than most prostitution IME (unless you consider having to feed a drug addiction a form of coercion)
I have no statistical figures, of course, but also there is some realistic truth to the idea that just about no woman/girl would willingly let a strange man stick his penis in her mouth or fuck her in the ass, unless that woman/girl was in a position in her life where she felt so desperate to get the money to get her drugs, this was the only way.
While this is probably true of the sketchiest kind of prostitution, I think it’s probably much less true of the high- or moderate-end kind of sex work (i.e. ‘soft’ prostitution, not just high end escorts but like the college sugar baby type thing) where they can select their clients, get taken out in style, etc… While there are probably few people who in a perfect world would blow Joe Q. Phonebook if they weren’t desperate, there are definitely women (and men, I guess) out there who like sex, and like money, and especially like sleeping with wealthy guys who give them money. This probably covers a fair amount of the women in places like Cuba who date rich foreign tourists for a week or whatever, and also a fair amount of the college students who date rich guys for money.
One who made part of her living with a poly/kink focused podcast. I’ve met a couple pro-dommes, though only in passing.
I met them because I’m an artist so my circles tend to overlap with various other fringe communities.
Why were they doing it? Money and/or attention, probably, but I never asked. Their attitude towards it ranged from “look at me!” enthusiasm to professionalism.
I never knew anything of their personal histories, but with podcast girl had the misfortune to discover that she most definitely has some sort of personality disorder – histrionic or narcissistic, if I had to take a guess. If you flattered her you were her BEST FRIEND but if she thought you threatened her position as Center of Attention from Everybody At All Times (regardless whether the threat was real) she would find a bus to throw you under and then back over you a few times, just to be sure. Her drama landed on me while I was looking in another direction, and it took WAY too long for me to extricate myself. I’d think I was finally rid of her and she’d show up for another go around. She was flat out insane, but unfortunately stealth insane so you wouldn’t know it unless and until you “crossed” her.
I knew a fellow who paid his way through law school as a phone sex worker (lonely female clients) through an escort service. He did it for the money. It was a job of which he was neither proud nor ashamed. He was a well-balanced person in a stable relationship with a woman, and he had no psychological problems or addictions. He quit phone sex work once he finished law school and obtained and articling position.
Again, this represents a tiny fraction of all prostitutes.
EtA: college girls who date rich guys for perks are another tiny minority.of all “sex workers”. This rosy picture of illegal prostitution simply does not exist, anywhere
When I said this story wasn’t mine to tell, I meant it. She’s not related to me, we’ve never hooked up. I’m proud that she managed to build a life after repeated childhood rape at the hands of some of her family members
and some of the elders of her creepy extremist protestant church. The short time that she did “club work” was to try to raise cash to run away from home. She would have been the same age as Tracy Lords was in her first film.
Another family took her in, and after many decades of therapy, she made it through to a good life on the other side.
The End.
I’m not sure if even that classy Norm MacDonald could bray and laugh at that one. :dubious:
This is actually an interesting area of case law. The 16th amendment allows the government to tax your income, while the fifth amendment prevents you from being required to testify about your illegal activities. There was a 1927 case, United States v. Sullivan, where a bootlager argued that by paying taxes he would be admitting to his criminal activities. Not so said justice Holmes, you could have reported the income while at the same time claiming your right against self incrimination.
Usually, you can report your illegal earnings for exactly what they are. The IRS just wants their money, and they are not allowed to give out return information without a court order, and are not allowed to proactively tip off cops. Now, I’m sure that it still happens illegally sometimes, so you’re probably better off just calling it “other income” and hoping you don’t get audited.
They may be a ‘tiny minority of all sex workers’, but in absolute numbers there are rather a lot of them. At the university where I went to grad school (a flagship Midwestern state university) something like 2% of the girls there were signed up on the Seeking Arrangement site, and I’m told the numbers for a lot of other flagship state schools are similar.
If you want to classify sugar babys as sex workers, that is, which is dubious.
That aside, as the New Zealand survey linked in that other thread points out, there are a lot of women from various walks of life who engage in transactional sex, and they’re not all desperate for money or drugs. There’s a large gray area between dating, marriage, and prostitution, and just because few people would willingly gravitate towards the sleaziest end of the spectrum, doesn’t mean that there are few would would willingly position themselves somewehere toward the middle.
Most of the prostitutes I have known in the United States have been in the lower pay grades. Drug habits and/or the lack of opportunities for better paying work was their motivation. Most did not have happy lives though in many cases their lives weren’t any worse than other people trapped in poverty who did not go into prostitution. In the Balkans, I meet a lot of prostitutes. During the war, they could be anybody from any sort of background. Survival cancels out a lot of religious and cultural background. Among them, I did encounter one set of prostitutes that actually seemed proud of their profession: the ex-camp follower. These were women that had previously been groupies or girlfriends to soldiers who had basically realized that the guys with whom they had been providing domestic work and having sex with were just using them. Once they realized this all subsequent men in their lives were cash upfront.
This Washington Post article says fewer than 15% of sex workers are street walkers FWIW. It is also an interesting read though it does not shed very much light on the demographics of sex workers.
Again, in the US, this represents a tiny fraction of “sex workers”. And I’m not referring to street walkers. The internet has exploded an entire new world of independent, low-end prostitution (but nowhere near the level of SWs).