(Photo of Audacia Ray by Logan Grendel)

violet blue:

I just read Who’s Counting: Sexonomics — Prostitutes’ Incomes (popup warning) at ABC news and my brain snapped like a rubber band. I’m going to the gym (today, definitely the punching bag) and I’ll be back after I cool off, but if anyone wants to send me comments on this, please do. I’d love to see what one of my brainy female sex-worker friends would do with this freakonomics-to-sex work model. Talk about confusing sex with marriage… Snip:

“Developing the consequences of their mathematical model, Edlund and Korn argue that the primary reason for the income differential is not the risk sometimes associated with the practice of prostitution but rather that prostitutes greatly diminish their chances for marriage by virtue of their occupation. Men generally don’t want to marry (ex)prostitutes, and so women must be relatively well-compensated in order to forgo the opportunity to marry.

“Employing market concepts, doing some calculus and assuming that “women sell and men buy,” the authors also conclude that prostitution generally declines as men’s incomes increase. Wives and prostitutes are competing “commodities” (in the reductionist view of economists, that is), but wives are distinctly superior in that they can produce children that are socially recognized as coming from the father.

“Thus, if men have more money, they tend to buy the superior good and, at least when wives and prostitutes come from the same pool of women, tend to buy (rent) the cheaper good less frequently. More obvious perhaps is that prostitution generally declines in areas where women’s incomes and opportunities are greater.”

So, does this mean the next time I rent a stud I should save the receipt? Seriously, also: gay sex work makes up a huge economic trade, and it’s totally missing from this lame article… (Thanks to nightbird for the link!)

Audacia Ray:

It’s an interesting attempt at the rationale behind the motives for prostitution and to puzzle out the answer to the question “why do prostitutes make so much damn money?” And I of course cannot resist the temptation to pick it apart. At this point I’ve only had energy to read the 3 page ABC News piece, and not the 35 page economics paper it is about – I’ll get to that when I’m not half dead with tiredness and shit-sick of reading academic papers.

First of all, the article (and the study it is about, I presume) makes the basic mistake that most media about sex work makes – the assumption that sex workers as a whole are of a particular class that is fairly uniform. Basically, this means that the population being written about isn’t identified in terms of where they exist in the spectrum of sex work possibilities and income level. In the ABC News piece, the workers being written about seem to be mid-level escorts or call girls, but this is never pointed out – the group of workers is just referred to as “prostitutes.” Though there is brief mention of the ugly side of non-consensual sex trafficking, there is no real discussion of the difference between what has been termed recreational and survival sex work. Survival sex work is sex work in which workers face multiple vulnerabilities including violence, entrenched poverty, and sexual and drug related harms. Survival sex workers are often street workers, who are much-maligned by the press and the law. Recreational sex workers are sex workers who evaluate their options for employment and then freely choose sex work – the workers written about in this piece are recreational sex workers. Though this becomes obvious in the discussion in the piece around marriage, these differences within the industry are never spelled out. In order to do and present research on sex workers that is well-considered, definition of terms is essential. Okay, semantics and methodology rant over. Onto the deconstruction (mmmm, deconstruction).

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