Magazine: Prostitution business still big
http://www.upi. com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/04/14/magazine_prostitution_business_still_big/1024/
Quirks
NEW YORK, April 14 (UPI) -- Prostitution is a growth field in the United States despite a slowing economy a New York business magazine said.
Portfolio said the average "escort" experience in the United States costs about $1,364, while the U.S. "escort economy" is valued at more than $109.6 million, the New York Post reported Monday.
A survey quoted by the magazine said about 700,000 American men pay for the services of prostitutes every year.
Portfolio said there are three major types of escort experiences: the "regular," which costs about $540; the "Spitzer" -- named for former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned his office after it was revealed that he paid for sex -- for about $4,300; and the "platinum," which costs about $64,000 for a "weekend-long encounter for the globetrotting billionaire."
The esteemed gentlemen of UPI are a little surprised, but very amused, to learn that the current recession (fancy word for increased poverty and financial instability) has not reduced prostitution. Perhaps they have not heard of girls and women in Iraq resorting to prostitution because, same as it ever was, war makes poverty, poverty makes girls without options, and impoverished men make themselves feel better by paying what little they have to inflict a comforting domination over someone even lower than them. Maybe they never put together that the red light districts that exist in cities in all 50 states are located in the poorest neighborhoods, or that SE Asia has become a rapist's playground because it is one of the poorest regions on Earth.
They're surprised prostitution isn't reduced in a recession because they really think prostitution is just work. The proposition that hoes will be hunky dory if prostitution were recognized as work is a pointless hypothetical in a world where reality already deems sexual servitude to be every woman's work. Men have long accepted ("oldest yadayada") prostituted women as workers, but men don't abuse prostitutes because they see them as professionals of sex , they abuse prostitutes because they see them as professional women. Men like sex. All the contempt, rape, and femicide women get, professional women get times a hundred (or, more accurately, times 40 as that Canadian mortality study showed).