I’ve seen a fairly common complaint in hobbyist forums — apparently some providers will be deliberately vague about their services (as they must be), and sometimes it’s not until the actual appointment that a client realizes the provider does not offer “full service”. Do you think providers do this purposefully or is it just an unfortunate effect of the industry being underground? Do you think these providers have a responsibility to communicate their strict limits before an encounter, or should clients not assume anything about what they’ll receive?
I do think that the vagueness about services is a direct (and wholly predictable) result of criminalization. Since our society wants to pretend that it’s moral and legal to criminalize thoughts (because that’s what motives are) in the case of sex, we arrive at the bizarre and absurd situation of two totally benign and legal activities (offering sex and asking others for money) becoming illegal when performed together. It’s therefore necessary to break the link between the two in situations where one suspects armed busybodies might be skulking about with intent to ruin peaceful people’s lives, either by being straightforward about the sex but coy about the money, or straightforward about the money but coy about the sex. The well-known Backpage nonsense about “roses” and common euphemisms such as “donation” are attempts at the former, while the standard “time and companionship only” disclaimer is an attempt at the latter. I say “attempt” because this evasive language fools absolutely nobody from escort to client to cop to judge; it’s part of an elaborate pantomime our society has concocted to pretend that persecution of private sexual behavior can ever be legitimate, and sex workers participate in it as a means of whistling in the dark and skating just below the strict evidentiary standard a judge who recognizes prostitution laws as evil (but dares not say so aloud) might impose upon cops and prosecutors.
Prostitution laws, and the arse-backward morality which supports and nourishes them, create an environment which rewards duplicity and punishes honesty; many sex workers who might prefer to be honest in their advertising are afraid to be, and some dishonest practitioners are thus easily able to hide amongst them. Ethically speaking, an escort should not take money for a service she doesn’t actually provide, nor lie about her services, nor allow clients to believe she offers things that she doesn’t; practically speaking, a client shouldn’t assume that absolutely everything he might want will absolutely be on the menu. Absolutely nobody but fraudsters and prohibitionists benefit from this kind of poor communication; a sex worker who doesn’t offer a given service doesn’t really want clients trying to push her into providing it, and a client who wants a particular service doesn’t really want to end up with someone who can’t or won’t provide it. The review system is an attempt to bring some sort of transparency to the process by establishing how individual escorts have behaved over time, but there will never be a wholly open and honest marketplace in our trade until we can do away with the smoke and mirrors created by criminalization and the demimonde’s attempts to protect itself from persecution.
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That sort of thing is pretty rare here now since decriminalisation.
My sister-in-law worked as a telephone receptionist for an escort call out centre and she was instructed to always ask about what was required and match it to her list of escorts and the services they provided. The client didn’t even get to talk to an escort unless s/he could give him what he wanted. It’s not only better for the clients, it’s safer for the providers.
But even in the bad old days well protected brothels (i.e. the ones who could pay off everyone requiring payment) printed quite explicit ‘menus’.
I used to work in a pathology lab that provided STI screening for the very expensive A Touch of Class parlour in Surry Hills. I obtained several of their ‘menus’ – graphically illustrated with “Love is …” type cartoons (remember them?) – for the entertainment of friends who would never have been able to afford what was on them.
The way it’s done on our local review board is that providers state what they won’t do, rather than what they will do. The reviews often make it clear what a provider will do. So there is not a lot of room for disappointment if one does one’s homework.
Many years ago I found out from someone I knew about an escort service that would send a woman to meet a client in a public place, hotel restaurant, etc. They would have the man sign a statement saying he knew he was paying for companionship, not sex. After he paid, the woman made it clear there would really be no sex and ask if he wanted her to stay. IMHO, this is fraud, but of course there was nothing the man could do. I think this is hugely different from being vague to avoid prosecution/persecution.
Decriminalisation would work for me, but I’ve talked to at least one sex worker who didn’t want it because she felt the risk of prosecution was low, at least where she worked, and it would likely drive her fees down.
I can’t say I’ve done a survey but it seems to me fees have come down here since decriminalisation. On the other hand sex workers get to keep more than half of it these days, unlike in the 1980s.
I would expect fees to drop with decriminalisation because there might be a little more competition and providers might have fewer expenses, especially those related to staying under the radar.
After decriminalisation, one would hope we would get normalisation. That is, sex work would be considered just one other choice as a way to make a living. The interesting question to me is if sex work were decriminalized and normalized, what would happen to relationships in our society? I have no easy answer for that.
I don’t think decriminalization would make much difference for relationships.
There are so many ways people can have sex outside of marriage now that the professional part of it would be quite negligible. I imagine that most people who are really interested in paying for sex are already doing it. Also a majority of men are still interested in serious relationships and having a family. Men always had mistresses and concubines since the dawn of time.
You might want to read Christopher Ryan’s research about what people may have been doing at the dawn of time, see his book “Sex at Dawn.” 🙂
The more sex/love/relationship issues are studied, the clearer it becomes that there is a great diversity of ways people desire various aspects of it. Compulsory monogamy may be on it’s way out. So ethical, that is honest and consensual ways of having multiple partners may start to be more common. So the question for me is, are long term cohabiting relationships going to survive, given the amount of work it takes to maintain them. This speculation is not new. It goes back at least as far as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
We’ve had decriminalisation for almost two decades and while it seems to have normalised the sex trade in many ways there’s also been the inevitable backlash.
There’s a bit of militant anti-whore feminism but my impression is that they haven’t been able to get the sort of traction here that they do in the US or UK. Sex trafficking claims in particular tend to fall pretty flat. Steadily increasing tertiary education fees have pushed more students into the sex industry so anti-whore academics are trying to mislead people who know more about it than they do. Mostly they save their lies about the NSW sex industry for overseas audiences who don’t know any better.
Residents’ groups are more of a concern but after so long crying wolf about the corruption of children they’re now more open about the fact they’re concerned about property values – which is semi-valid because it’s self-fulfilling. They overplay antisocial public behaviour and blame the sex industry for attracting it to their suburb.
Cops and politicians still occasionally run with the organised crime furphy and if anything that’s gaining more public credence as memories of the crime and corruption of the bad old days starts to fade. Both cops and state politicians miss the bribes from the sex industry and regularly call for it to be placed back under their jurisdiction.
Apart from reduced corruption and increased safety the biggest plus has probably been the flattening of the structure of the industry. The majority of whores now work on their own, with one or two colleagues or in small independent brothels instead of being beholden to crime bosses who can keep the law off their backs (often literally).
It’ll probably take another forty years until the habitual whore haters have died off before it becomes truly normalised.
I blame the confusion on stupid men who don’t do their research properly – or at all. There is this constant drone of “noise” from the crowd I call … “The Backpage Gamblers”. The “Gamblers” are ass deep in Backpage – which admittedly has a few “gems” … scattered in with millions of scams and pseudo-scams. A chick throws up a picture of herself on BP – and if the dudes just GOOGLED the image they’d find it’s someone like Brooke Little (who is a model in the U.K.). But no, they don’t Google … they just bitch because “Brooke Little” wasn’t the girl that answered the door.
I always ask: what’s your style and what are your prohibition? Works for me, but no system is perfect, if one is a renegade on the outskirts of the law bad things can happen, oh! wait, bad things can happen no matter what!
Thanks so much for your answer, Maggie! I really appreciate the perspective. I tend to agree that most of the dishonesty in the adult industry is a result of criminalization. Nothing infuriates me as deeply as self-fulfilling prophecy, and the adult industry is unfortunately littered with them. People assume sex work is unethical, so they throw up laws around it that make it almost impossible to behave ethically. People assume sex work is dangerous, so they throw up laws that make it almost impossible to work safely. And everyone else just sees the duplicity and the danger, and the cycle continues.
I think most sex workers and their clients act ethically because I think sex work and enjoying the services of sex workers is ethical. I think that because it does no harm, and can benefit the client by being pleasurable, educational, and/or healing. The laws against sexual expression in general are hurtful and needlessly restrictive. So I think they are not ethical.
There are a variety of tactics one can use against oppressive laws. One is to go underground and disobey them secretly. That is what we are mostly doing now regarding sex work. I think that is ethical, and I think the protection we feel we get by not being explicit about what is offered or desired is self protection, not unethical. Everyone, including law enforcement, knows what is really going on. But mostly they don’t enforce the bad laws. But if someone did explicitly say what they offered or what they desired, I think they would stand a better chance of being persecuted.
Another tactic against oppression is to confront it directly with protest. This has worked well for gay marriage.
A third tactic is to work through the political process. Although it is rarely mentioned, this actually worked in Seattle a few years ago. A referendum to severely limit lap dancing in strip clubs was placed on the ballot. The heart of it was the “four foot rule” mandating dancers stay at least four feet away from clients. The club owners put money up to fight the referendum, and it was voted down. This indicates that sensible approaches to other forms of sex work might be politically viable, at least in Seattle.
I certainly didn’t mean to make it sound as if I believe sex work itself is intrinsically unethical. But it seems to me that in sex work, as in all things sex-related, honesty and open communication would be hugely important. And so it does strike me as somewhat unethical (though not maliciously so, in this case) for either party to be deliberately vague. The need for self-protection created by criminalization makes it difficult for clients to tell honest providers from dishonest ones, and visa versa, and it gives the whole industry a bad rap.
My take of unethical is people who suggest they will provide a service and then don’t deliver it, but take your money anyway. I think that is different from being circumspect, not specifying exactly what services are offered, as a kind of ritual to avoid persecution by law enforcement. I think clients learn to translate the circumspect language, so they can mostly figure out what is what.
I’m binge watching “Masters of Sex” now, so it is making me ask questions about data. How would we know if the vague, or circumspect presentations by providers are, in fact, giving the field a bad rap? And of course the field is segmented, so anyone with a little sophistication would expect more problems with street sex workers, then maybe less with the Backpage advertisers, and almost none with providers reviewed on review boards.
Interviewing clients might be helpful in obtaining data about how clients perceive the field. There has not been nearly as much written, let alone good research, done on clients as on providers. (IMHO, clients are viewed at least as negatively as providers, and removing the stigma they bear would certainly help the field.) My hypothesis is that most clients would understand how to avoid unethical providers and that they wouldn’t let a few bad apples give them a negative view of the field. After all, there are certainly a few bad apple clients, too, and I don’t think that negates provider opinion of the majority who are respectful and grateful.
The other issue stemming from criminalization and dovetailing on unspecified services (time and companionship is the affected morality. Suddenly everyone from strip club managers to escorts become arbiters of everyone else’s morality. A hierarchy is created by which the closer you are physically to those you serve in the profession, the less moral you are. Strip clubs then punish strippers for being too “slutty”- both with fines and with shaming. Sex workers shame each other too- dancers shame other dancers, escorts have a whole other shaming hierarchy.