How Do Prostitutes Stay in Business?

Here’s a question for the behavioral economists: How do prostitutes stay in business?

With the sexual revolution and the hookup culture and young women making love like porn stars, how can a hooker make a living?

If you are charging money for something that people can get for free, eventually it will impact your business.

In the old days nice girls didn’t. Without specifying what nice girls wouldn’t do, men who wanted "it" sought out prostitutes.

Nowadays, there is precious little that nice girls don’t do. Thanks to a certain social movement nice girls are liberated. They will do just about anything, and will refuse to allow a man to pay for them.

Many of them won’t even want to see him in the morning.

Free love has come to mean giving it away for free. No one knows how prevalent the practice is, but nice girls are marrying later and are avoiding encumbering alliances. If we assume that they are sexually active during their twenties, then clearly they have crowded the market in non-committal sex.

Young women who are out making their way in the world today will avoid relationships, but they will happily engage in all kinds of sexual gymnastics—check out New York Magazine’s “Sex Diaries”. They do not want to be tied down, just yet. (At least not in the metaphorical sense.) No man's man’s emotional demands will get in the way of their career advancement.

It’s tough competition for prostitutes?

The marketplace being what it is, prostitutes have now adapted. They continue to offer something that nice girls no longer offer, but it isn't kinky sex. It is emotional attachment: love, romance and a maybe even a relationship, with a little sex on the side.

Nowadays it’s called the girlfriend experience. It’s the ultimate in sex work, considerably more difficult and better paid than common fellatio.

Strange as it seems, if you are a young man today you often have to pay a woman to act like she’s your girlfriend.

Even the term “escort” which is commonly taken to be a euphemism for prostitute, has traditionally referred to a woman who would accompany a man to a social or cultural event. She was a stand-in girlfriend.

In the old days prostitutes used to know how to do things that nice girls had never even heard of. Today, prostitutes know how to do things that nice girls do not know how to do: that is to conduct relationships.

Young women today are proficient at being sex kittens. Many of them become expert in the art of dating. Fewer know how to conduct a relationship with a man.

When they reach their thirties and decide that it’s time to settle down they discover that their kill at mind-blowing sex and at serial dating, coupled with their professional credentials do not compensate for the fact that they do not know how to have a relationship.

The result: a generation of love-starved men.

CBS News has the story:

A new analysis of men who pay for sexual activities suggests that their true goal is finding something a bit more complicated – true love – even if it’s from the sex worker.

In this new study, Christine Milrod and co-author Ronald Weitzer analyzed 2,442 postings on an online discussion board from a sex provider review site where more than a million clients of sex workers read and post about their experiences. Approximately one-third included a discussion about emotional intimacy between sex workers and their clients, many of whom expressed a desire to grow their relationships beyond the physical level in the form of sharing private feelings and mutual love.

Anyone who imagined that men were simple-minded dolts who merely wanted a ready supply of quick and easy sex did men a serious disservice. It made them into a caricature. Reducing male sexuality to the wish to get off as often as possible is contemptuous and contemptible.

Remember Ashley Dupree. Yes, the high class escort who brought down former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. And who went on to be an advice columnist for The New York Post.

Yes, that Ashley Dupree.

Well, Ashley is in love. She is engaged to be married and is seven months pregnant.

It gives new meaning to the term “happy ending.” Or, I should say, it restores the old meaning.