crackheads movin on up - to the top - a deluxe apt in da sky - hehe I wonder if Mish puts these increased wages into his macro thinking from the worlds OLDEST profession - hehe A way for those 100K in debt college kids to get out of it quick - hehe.
timesonline.co.uk
The Sunday Times - Britain
The Sunday Times January 22, 2006
Focus: Selling the sex the middle class way
Ministers want to crack down on street prostitution but are they missing a trick? It’s the middle classes, says Richard Woods, who are dressing up vice as something glamorous
Click, and a website appears with the image of a seductive woman, tiger-like on all fours, wearing very little. This, it announces, is “Europe’s premier escort agency” based in London.
Below, quoting from an article in the fashionable magazine Tatler, the agency claims to be “frequented by high-profile London society and members of the aristocracy”.
Click again, and you enter its realm of “elite companions” whose ministrations cost £300 an hour or more. Galleries of photographs display young women, striking for their apparent normality as much as their attractiveness.
Only their time is for sale, of course; and whatever happens between “consenting adults” is a matter for them. But there’s no mistaking the possibilities.
This is one of the many painted faces of Britain’s discreet trade in people and sex — and one that is proliferating fast. In cyberspace red-light districts now come in all colours, with websites in blues, greens and golds serving every city and many other parts of the country. You name it, it’s there.
Yet when the government published its “co-ordinated prostitution strategy” last week, this shadowy world was largely ignored. Instead, the government set its sights on tackling street prostitution, a social sore invariably stereotyped by grainy pictures of plastic miniskirts on grimy street corners bending towards car windows.
Few would argue with the aim of helping vulnerable, drug-addicted, desperate women to escape street prostitution, or with removing the blight it brings to neighbourhoods. And nobody can condone the trafficking of women forced to be sex slaves.
But the greater phenomenon, it seems, is the rise of what might be termed middle-class prostitution. The trading of sex through escort agencies and personal ads has been the dotcom bubble that never deflated.
Type “female escort” into Google’s UK pages and you get 760,000 hits. In London’s clubland and smart hotels, women of a certain availability are ever present. Margaret McDonald, a former convent girl from Berkshire, earned fame, of a sort, for running a string of prostitutes comfortable with fine wines and expensive clothes.
“Prostitution,” opined one female observer recently, “is being rebranded as an extension of the entertainment industry.” And studies suggest that one in 10 British men — 2.3m — have already been entertained.
Among those in the milieu is Charlotte, a pretty 24-year-old, originally from Cumbria but now in London, with a university degree and a job in event management. “I started doing escort work when I was at college,” she said. “It was all fairly upmarket so I knew we’d be dealing with guys with a bit of money, but what really shocked me was that a lot of them were quite young and good-looking.” BWAHAHA I have been saying this for years - why cant these studs get it for free anymore? hehe what has changed about our world.
In other cases sexual transactions are couched in even more straightforwardly commercial terms. One popular website, dealing in “adult work”, provides a forum where men and women can place requests — a meeting in a hotel room at 4pm, say, for which they are happy to pay up to £200. Interested others then bid for the business.
Is this just individual liberation and the free market getting it together? Or is it, too, decadence — little better for taking place behind doors than in the street? “We are very confused about sex and prostitution,” said Dr Petra Boynton, a London-based sex researcher. “On the one hand you have people saying it is dreadful, all these poor women being used on the street. Yet others are offering lucrative publishing contracts to women who write about being upmarket hookers. The government wants a clampdown, and Hollywood’s just released a blockbuster about a geisha. There’s a dichotomy — and we’re not sure what to do about it.”
For at what point, if any, does prostitution turn from anathema to acceptability? And if we accept that some, more upmarket, forms of prostitution are permissable, can we really expect to crack down effectively on the rest?
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