The New Spectrum of Sex Workers
I was having a work dinner with a French capital allocator and he mentioned to me that he had gone on a date with a female friend of mine.
I asked how they met and what he said next startled me:
Seeking arrangements, you know it?
It wasn’t shocking that he used it (this was after all a middle-aged guy in finance) it was shocking that the girl I knew used it – she had graduated from college and made six figures and was from a wealthy family. What was she doing on a website for aspiring sugar babies?
Seeing my look of bewilderment, he added.
Bro, they’re are all on it. Let me show you.
And then a guy who I had met only an hour before pulled up a PDF on his phone that contained pictures of women. He proceeded to walk me through “The New Hooker Spectrum.”
My idea of prostitution was outdated. The women who worked corners or showed up in hotel rooms were but a small slice of this new economy.
Instagram and student debt had created a new class of single women who were more rabid than ever for things and experiences. They had jobs but not jobs that paid them what they needed to satisfy their tastes and they weren’t getting married anytime soon – so they were solving that consumption gap through what can be best described as sponsorship.
But the caveat is that these women had to also balance their feminist ideals. So this new system was built around cleverly disguising the very obvious quid pro quo – paying someone $100 in cash for oral sex was not what this was about.
The first picture he showed was of a pretty girl aged 30 who works in fashion PR. You have dinner and you sleep with her and after you’re done, you give her a handbag. For some reason giving her a handbag instead of cash absolved you – it was just a date night with a gift.
The Handbag Girl
The next picture was of a girl who had just graduated from USC and was about to start a job at PWC. The prior weekend he had flown her out to the Hamptons on a Blade and he venmoed her $1k a day. She hung out and slept with him whenever he wanted. It wasn’t cash – it was venmo.
Then he showed a slew of pictures of girls who looked like models or wanna be influencers. These were the sponsorettes. You fly them, house them and feed them and in return they just have to exist and be hot. There is no explicit quid pro quo but if you put in some effort, they sleep with you.
The Sponsorette
Adjacent to the sponsorettes were what he called "atmosphere girls." These girls just showed up to a party usually in groups and hung out and got paid for appearing. If you wanted to host a party and look cooler than you were, they facilitated that.
The Atmosphere Girls
According to this guy, a vast plurality of women were caught somewhere in or near this new spectrum. And what was true for NYC was apparently even more true in LA where he lived.
Today, girls who move to LA have gone straight into the hooking spectrum and skipped the whole failed actress phase of existence.
After he finished with his tour de force explanation, the Frenchman turned to me and said:
Look I spend most of my time managing my hooker infrastructure. I need it. Being married is just so boring and if I didn’t have this outlet, I’d go nuts.
At this point, I asked whether this was bad in the long run for these girls? Weren’t they becoming heroin addicts of the good life and isn’t it hard to turn that drip off?
He had a devastating response:
These girls have two choices.
They can go hook up with a random young guy their age and hope it turns into a relationship but often times it doesn’t. Keep doing that and over time all you have done is accrue flings for nothing.
You can do the exact same thing with me and at least you leave the next day with a new iPhone.
If you don’t see what the better trade is then I can’t invest with you.
With that final flourish, he left to go meet handbag girl who was waiting in a nearby hotel room while silencing his wife’s incoming call…
In a 1910 survey, the US census bureau determined that conservatively 200,000 women at the time were working prostitutes - roughly 2% of all American women in their 20s.
As Leavitt relates in SuperFreakonomics, a run of the mill prostitute in 1910 could easily earn north of six figures (in today’s dollars) and more than 4x their alternative professional option.
Then birth control was introduced and a sexual revolution occurred in the 60s. Women stopped demanding marriage before sex and the earnings power of being a street girl collapsed.
Why go to a bordello when you can go to a bar? In 1910 almost a third of all men lost their virginity to a prostitute, today that is rare. Today most traditional prostitutes (not speaking of the high-end call girls) can barely make-due.
But why were women like my friend who didn’t need to enter into an arrangement now doing so?
Maybe the problem is that the new paradigm of sexual liberation wasn’t working as planned.
It’s a lot more expensive being a girl than being a guy. But guys generally make more money than girls. So there is a consumption delta here – women spend more but earn less than guys.
In the past that delta was solved by marriage. In order to have sex, a young man committed to a woman and his resources became hers and she could live comfortably.
But now that marriage has been delayed (sometimes indefinitely), you’ve got this growing gap between what women want to do and what they can afford to do with their regular job.
If such a girl started to sleep with different guys hoping that one would take her up as a wife, maybe that strategy worked but maybe it didn’t. And if it wasn’t working, did it not on some level make more sense for her to not let guys get a free ride? She now had to enter the hooker spectrum to solve this consumption gap.
So, we now have a plurality of women existing on some nebulous part of this new spectrum as the delta between their consumption and their ability to fund it has grown. Add in Instagram and the consumption demand curve increases more. Social media has not only increased appetites but has made women more discoverable.
If you’re an attractive girl living in Topeka, Kansas – someone in LA can DM you and have you fly out there for the weekend and you can begin your journey onto the hooker spectrum whereas in the past no one knew you existed and you just got married to the local guy in Topeka and became a soccer mom and were none the wiser that there are guys out there that would have paid you in Chanel to go to St. Barts.
So now we are creating a world where at least for some spectrum of people, sex and relationships have been reduced to transactions. Women get the shoes and the Instagram experiences and men get to avoid commitment.
But does this leave everyone happier in the long run?
Not making any moral judgements here. If two willing adults consensually agree to something, then that’s their business.
I’ll just miss the days when such transactions were more clearly demarcated.