Religions > Atheism > OT: A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
22 Jan 2006 11:03:47 PM |
| Object: |
OT: A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10879309/
A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away
In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 7:52 a.m. ET Jan. 20, 2006
Angelica is a shade over 5½ feet tall. She is in her late 20s, and she
has straight brown hair down to the middle of her back. She has an
athletic body with surgically sculpted breasts. She sports a few tattoos
but no pubic hair, and her belly button is pierced.
For the right price — which she pegs at $350 an hour, to start —
Angelica will have sex with you. She will perform unprotected oral sex,
and she will usually agree to anal intercourse. She will, if you have
the money, bring a second lady with her, and they will have sex with
each other for your enjoyment. Or, if you wish, she will set up an S&M
scene.
We know all this about Angelica because she is a professional escort,
and you can read what her customers say about her on Web sites where men
who purchase such services gather to review and rate thousands of
working ladies like her.
There is a great deal more — very explicit and very detailed — about
Angelica and what she does in her profile on The Erotic Review, the
largest of the escort-rating Web sites. In its aim and practice, it
essentially is a consumer guide for prostitutes and johns.
“I know from an escort’s point of view the review boards really, really
help a lot, because everyone always asks, ‘Well, do you have reviews?’”
said Billie, an escort in a Midwestern state whose name, like those of
all other escorts cited in this report, has been changed. “If they’re
bad, that’s not good, but when they’re good ones, it really helps an
escort get established when she’s just starting out.”
Not all escorts sell sex. Some sell sensual massages or even actual,
non-sexual dinner companionship. But law enforcement officials estimate
that 90 percent to 95 percent of the escorts listed on the Web sites are
selling sex. And there is very little the police can do about it, even
when it is openly discussed on sites like The Erotic Review.
Pursuing ‘the hobby’
Many men make a lifestyle out of patronizing escorts. They call it “the
hobby,” not prostitution, and they are “hobbyists,” not johns. They
consider themselves connoisseurs of fine women, and they are eager to
learn from their fellow hobbyists who will provide exactly what they
want.
What they want is generally very clear: They want a centerfold model who
will hang adoringly on their every word in public, then perform any sex
act in any position with professional skill in private. The combination
— a romantic dinner date followed by uninhibited sex — is called the
“girlfriend experience,” or GFE. Of Angelica, a reviewer wrote, “The
term GFE should be based on what she is.”
Before review sites came along, hobbyists had no way to protect
themselves, said David R. Elms, president of The Erotic Review, which
began in 1999 and claims that it gets 350,000 unique visitors a day.
“I’m a hobbyist, and I was getting ripped off,” Elms said. “There was no
way to hold people accountable for their actions.
“There had to be a way to get this information out,” he said. “If a guy
got ripped off or he received good service, then he could tell somebody.
We treat it as something equivalent to going out on a hot date and
telling a hundred thousand of your closest friends.”
Officially, review sites insist that it is just the hot date that men
are paying for — in other words, companionship and conversation, not
sex. Whatever happens beyond that “is purely a matter of personal choice
and personal preference between two or more consenting adults,” says a
disclaimer on Big Doggie, another nationwide escort review site. The
Erotic Review goes further: “You can give it away for free, but you
can’t sell it.”
But interviews with working escorts across the country and with
review-site operators, activists for prostitutes’ rights and law
enforcement officials bear out what is evident in the reviews
themselves: Sex is the “it” being sold.
“‘Escorts’ — right,” said Master Sgt. Bruce C. Woodbury, head of the
Vice/Morals Unit of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa,
Fla., which mounted an ultimately unsuccessful sting operation against
Big Doggie in 2002. “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
For escorts, a complicated relationship
Professional escorts have a love-hate relationship with The Erotic
Review and Big Doggie, where, for a monthly or quarterly fee, men can
find out exactly what a woman’s customers think of her.
The sites represent the ultimate commodification of women, who are
impersonally rated by anonymous men in much the same way they would
judge a sports car or a racehorse. Some find it demeaning, but most
acknowledge that it’s a fast, easy way to build a reliable client base.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Helen, a $350-an-hour escort in a
Western state, who said she was in the business to make enough money to
go to graduate school so she could teach.
“Yes, it does give you exposure that you may not otherwise get,” she
said. But at the same time, an escort can find her livelihood held
hostage to the whims of a customer who doesn’t get exactly what he
wants, at the price he wants to pay.
“This lady spoke to a client she considered a friend, and she was
apparently very upset because the guy had threatened to post a bad
review,” Helen said. “I’ve personally never had it happen, but I know it
has happened.”
The sites serve another purpose, too: They make prostitution a little
safer, because women can challenge unfair or inaccurate reviews in
forums on the sites and they can lodge complaints with site
administrators.
Much more than streetwalkers or prostitutes who are controlled by pimps,
a professional escort has a significant element of control, because she
can screen potential clients, who already know how pricey her services
are — top-dollar escorts in New York have been known to command $2,000
an hour.
That control is elevated when a client comes to her through a review
site. Reviewers earn credibility by the accuracy of their reviews, so
over time, an escort can essentially rate the men who are rating her.
Robyn Few, a former prostitute who lobbies to decriminalize prostitution
as executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in San
Francisco, said that on a personal level, “I hate it” that women are
“being reviewed and rated like some subhuman.”
But she added: “The Erotic Review and Big Doggie took some of the danger
out of it. When providers have a bad client, they write about it. ...
It’s one way to out the bad guys.”
Billie, who said she got at least 90 percent of her business through The
Erotic Review and a similar local review site, said: “I haven’t had a
bad experience at all. The people that I have seen, or whatever, they
have all been professionals — really upper-class people.”
Cleaning up prostitution
If nothing else, Few and many escorts say, the success of The Erotic
Review and Big Doggie demonstrate that prostitution can be a respectable
business. For the first time, the women are not victims, they say — they
are not walking the streets, and they are relatively protected, and they
run their own business affairs.
Now it is the customer who must solicit the prostitute, not the other
way around, as it has always been through history. From the safety and
relative anonymity of their living rooms, highly rated independent
escorts like Billie and Helen can pick and choose from hundreds of
potential clients.
“I pretty much have regular clients now,” said Billie, whose ratings are
consistently 8 to 10 (out of 10) for both appearance and “performance.”
These are men whom she has screened and whom she trusts, and she thinks
that’s why “I’ve never been cheated or anything.”
In the future, the balance of power will shift more and more to women
who approach prostitution as a profession and can take advantage of
advances in technology, said Few, the sex workers advocate.
“We are not going to stop prostitution. We are not going to stop it,”
she said. “It is not going to be abolished. It is not going away. And
the Internet has connected us around the world.”
Said Helen, the escort from the West: “Technology increases
exponentially. So who knows what’s going to be out there in 10 years?”
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
.
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| User: "chibiabos" |
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| Title: Re: OT: A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts |
23 Jan 2006 08:04:00 PM |
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In article <0ro8t1tj9kimu45pgt6l82sh5hj5e1r9u5@4ax.com>, stoney
<stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10879309/
A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away
No link?
I think it was Heinlein who said something to the effect that a good
prostitute is better than any dozen priests.
-chib
--
Member of S.M.A.S.H.
Sarcastic Middle-aged Atheists with a Sense of Humor
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: OT: A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts |
24 Jan 2006 03:37:55 PM |
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On Mon, 23 Jan 2006 18:04:00 -0800, chibiabos <chib@nospam.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
In article <0ro8t1tj9kimu45pgt6l82sh5hj5e1r9u5@4ax.com>, stoney
<stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10879309/
A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away
No link?
Guess not.
I think it was Heinlein who said something to the effect that a good
prostitute is better than any dozen priests.
A good prostitute is better than a dozen divisions of clergy.
Or would that be battalions? Whichever measure is larger.
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: OT: A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts |
23 Jan 2006 04:39:49 PM |
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On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:03:47 -0800, stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10879309/
A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away
In explicit detail, Web sites ‘review’ services of professional escorts
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 7:52 a.m. ET Jan. 20, 2006
Angelica is a shade over 5½ feet tall. She is in her late 20s, and she
has straight brown hair down to the middle of her back. She has an
athletic body with surgically sculpted breasts. She sports a few tattoos
but no pubic hair, and her belly button is pierced.
For the right price — which she pegs at $350 an hour, to start —
Angelica will have sex with you. She will perform unprotected oral sex,
and she will usually agree to anal intercourse. She will, if you have
the money, bring a second lady with her, and they will have sex with
each other for your enjoyment. Or, if you wish, she will set up an S&M
scene.
We know all this about Angelica because she is a professional escort,
and you can read what her customers say about her on Web sites where men
who purchase such services gather to review and rate thousands of
working ladies like her.
AMEN!
Sunyata
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