Dating Prostitutes

I'm currently doing an academic research project on prostitution, so I've got antennas up for any popular press piece that is about prostitution. In this article, the journalist takes a lot of prostitutes on simple dates (bowling, minature golf), and no sex, just to get a sense of who they are and what they are like. One of the women wants to be an economist - the next Alan Greenspan! (Bernanke has to be pissed if he's reading this. Diss!). Her plan to fund all the social programs without raising taxes will be quite an achievement, no doubt.

The article is well-written - a real humane piece. But there's nothing in here that I didn't already know, since all that is in it is personal stories of these women, and the stories are not too surprising. Like finding an older woman going through a change due to losing her job (not uncommon in the data we're collecting), or the college grad doing this because it pays so much more than the alternatives.

But, one thing that the journalist is doing, which he doesn't recognize, is that he's calling prostitutes from craigslist, which from what we're learning tend to be the most at-risk women in this industry. They are the historical street prostitutes, only they stand on the craigslist corner instead of the street corner. These women, at least based on reports, are the more naive women - less likely to use the available technology to screen clients, more likely to get arrested, more likely to get victimized by their clients (one woman in the article claims she was kidnapped for three days by her client - a lot of good that driver did for her then). A lot of the women we speak to do not advertise on craigslist, but have professional and personalized websites or use services that help them market to higher paying clientele. Still, it's an interesting article. What we're learning from our research, to be just very simple about it, is that the Internet has made this market larger than ever. Not only has it moved a lot of prostitution off the streets; it's also moved a lot of women into prostitution who wouldn't have done so twenty years ago. The chances of getting caught, arrested, or detected by friends/family are much lower as a result of these new technologies. It's also affected buyers too. No more Hugh Grant, cruising street corners. Just go to one of the several well-known websites where clients share information about the women they've been with, and use those services to help find more optimal prostitutes to spend time with. Not only does it lower the search costs, the Internet lowers the risks for contracting and increases the optimality of the match between client and seller. All that to say, we believe the Internet has brought a lot of people into this that previously were not. And if you think that social norms are a function of how common something is, then it wouldn't surprise me in the least if in ten-twenty years, solicitation is much less stigmatized compared to today.

Don't take this post as an endorsement of prostitution, btw. It's purely descriptive and theoretical.