In an excerpt from their new book Superfreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner profile two women. One, LaSheena, has "a beaten-down look in her eyes," and makes her money stealing and turning tricks on Chicago's South Side. She says prostitution "bothers me mentally," and she's not pulling down that much money either — street prostitutes in Chicago make about $350 a week. The other woman is Allie, an attractive blond who works about 15 hours a week having sex with men in her pretty bedroom for $500 an hour. Allie "genuinely likes the men who come to her" and "they treat her, in many ways, as men are expected to treat their wives but often don't." She's also building on the entrepreneurial skills she's learned as a prostitute by going back to school in economics. Life, for Allie, is good.

It's so good, in fact, that "the less she works, the more she earns," and she can charge ever-higher fees without scaring off clients. Levitt and Dubner write,

Although she views herself as similar to a street prostitute, she has less in common with that kind of woman than she does with a trophy wife. Allie is essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour. She isn't really selling sex, or at least not sex alone. She sells men the opportunity to trade in their existing wives for a younger, more sexually adventurous version - without the trouble and long-term expense of actually having to go through with it.

And:

Street prostitutes like LaSheena might have the worst job in America. But for elite prostitutes like Allie, the circumstances are completely different: high wages, flexible hours and relatively little risk of violence or arrest. So the real puzzle isn't why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don't choose this career.

Echidne of the Snakes takes Levitt and Dubner to task on several points. She points out that they don't delve at all into the reasons why women aren't all lining up to be hookers:

It's something about the mysterious women, refusing to supply sex for good money, when they should. They are probably too stupid to realize that they could do that instead of getting married as trophy wives. Which is just prostitution under another name.

She also thinks Levitt and Dubner see Allie's behavior — "She is happy to see you every time you show up at her door. Your favourite music is already playing and your favourite drink is on ice. She will never ask you to take out the rubbish." — as "the proper way for a wife to act." That may be true. But the whole analysis comes off as less sexist than flippant, uninterested in larger questions of why some women can make lots of money at prostitution but others can't. Levitt and Dubner imply that it's some combination of talent and business smarts. But the real issues here may be those of race and class.

Levitt and Dubner don't explicitly identify Allie's or LaSheena's race — in terms of physical characteristics, we know that the former is blond and the latter has "straightened hair." And we don't know all the details of their backgrounds either. The authors say nothing of LaSheena's upbringing or education, but we know that Allie "grew up in a large and largely dysfunctional family in Texas," joined the military, and became educated enough to get a job in computer programming. So at the time she became a sex worker, it seems that Allie had entered the middle class. Given that she makes her living as a street prostitute, thief, and drug lookout, we can assume that LaSheena has not. And this may be the biggest difference.

LaSheena probably doesn't have the resources to set up a nice bedroom where gentlemen can lay their $500 on the dresser. She may not be able to afford their favorite drink, or a stereo to play their favorite music. She may not have the education to engage in the kind of talk that Allie's clients want along with their sex. And most of all, by virtue of her class, she's probably not able to act like the kind of trophy wife Allie's clients — middle-aged white men with plenty of disposable income — think they deserve.

The fact that Levitt and Dubner ignore all this — in addition to whatever role race might play in prostitution opportunities, if any — is the biggest blind spot in their article. Yes, the comparison between wives and prostitutes is sexist and outdated and problematic. And yes, the question of why more women don't become sex workers ignores the fact that sex isn't just a commodity like any other. But what Levitt and Dubner really seem to be asking is why more women don't become high-end escorts like Allie. The answer is probably that they can't, but Levitt and Dubner apparently aren't interested in why.

Freakonomics Returns: Vice Work If You Can Get It [TimesOnline]
The New Career Choice For Women: High-End Prostitution! [Echidne of the Snakes]

Quan, an ex-call girl herself, gets her interviewees to dish not just on the quirks of sex work (for instance, some female virgins pay a professional for their first time), but also on gender and race. One male former prostitute, Andrew Rosetta, said his job "would have been a part-time pursuit if I only saw women." Interestingly, he found that when he told his girlfriends about his job, they were more uncomfortable with him servicing women than men. One girlfriend forbade him from seeing female clients at all. With the clients themselves, though, the situation was reversed — the women Rosetta saw professionally didn't want to know that he also slept with men.

Damien Decker, an escort working in New York, takes a different approach. He has sex with female escorts while his male clients watch. "Everybody thinks what I do is so cool," he says, "but there's a racist aspect." Decker is a European black man who usually pretends to be African-American on the job, and his partners are white women who pretend to be a client's wife or girlfriend. Thus, the clients are paying for the fantasy of being cuckolded by a black man. Since these clients never touch Decker, his business model bears out the notion that sex is as much mental and physical — but that doesn't make his job any less disturbing.

The Sex Lives Of Male Hookers [Daily Beast]

While you might hear the words "Daily Mail" and "escort addiction" and mentally call for the check - I did - Andy Bodle's essay is suprisingly interesting. Misguided? Troubled? Worrisome? Sure - as only those things written with "now I know better" authority can be - but also thought-provoking. See, Bodle's not, he's at pains to tell us, the kind of guy who would have ever seen himself paying for sex. And he says now, "I'm ashamed of exploiting women, and of having supported a degrading, dangerous industry. I don't expect anyone to condone what I did.But now, after many years have passed, I want to explain why I was propelled into that addiction - and why so many other men are, too." And he;s still kind glad he did it!

Well-educated and successful, Bodle nevertheless had a disastrous history with women: mocked in school, painfully shy, and by his own reckoning stood up 27 times in the 90s. Cue violins.

When I hit 30, I hadn't had a girlfriend - or even a kiss - for three years. I was starting to feel desperate: lonely and with little to look forward to. I'd never seriously thought about paying for female company: my image of the sex industry was of kerbcrawlers and kneetremblers in needle-strewn alleyways. But, according to the article, it was very safe and very clean. You visited the girls in plush, rented apartments; you were paying for companionship, not sex.

Of course, although he treats the transactions like dates - insisting on buying the escorts dinner, bringing them flowers, and choosing to believe the pros "like" him - they invariably end in sex. And not shockingly, this boosts his ego. He gets 'hooked' - blowing through his savings, forswearing normal dating altogether. "My reasoning went like this: why should I hang around trying to pick up women in bars when I could meet far more attractive women with no risk of getting hurt emotionally?"

As we've seen, the man is susceptible to the media; not shockingly, he falls for one of the working girls, even paying for her to spend his birthday with him. "I was convinced, after that, that Hayley and I had a special connection. Maybe the whole Pretty Woman myth was true. Maybe, if I played my cards right, I could persuade her to quit escorting and be with me."

Um, no. His bubble is further burst when one woman mentions that his visit will allow her to pay her electric bill. And he has a revelation.

In a year of visiting escorts, this was the first incontrovertible evidence I'd heard that not every girl did escorting because they enjoyed it. Some of them were doing it because they had to. And even though Sylvia seemed to like me, even though I had helped her out in the short-term, I was helping to perpetuate that situation. Perhaps I'd been naive not to notice anything amiss before; perhaps I was just too immersed in my own self-pity at being single to worry about anyone else's feelings. But the truth is that up until that point, I had genuinely been convinced that all the girls I'd seen were selling their bodies entirely of their own free will.

When one escort starts crying, he leaves without sex and gives up the lifestyle, gradually easing back into non-paid relationships. While the depth of his delusion - or denial - is kind of hard to grasp, we try to stay with him. So, does he regret it? Well, here's where the article gets weird.

Many people say that men who use escort girls hate women. That may be true for some; but in my case, I believe those escorts stopped me hating women. I feel gratitude towards those sweet, beautiful girls for the warmth they showed me. Guilt, absolutely, that I helped perpetuate an industry that is unregulated and potentially unsafe - but also gratitude. I firmly believe that while some sex workers are escorts by choice, thousands of others are not. And the fact is, when you book an escort, you never know which you are going to get. And that's why I'll never again try to re-create the 'girlfriend experience'. The truth is that it's an unedifying sham.

Basically, what's at war here are what he thinks he should think about the women, and his own self-interest. Is he sorry he - maybe - exploited women and promoted an industry he finds problematic? Nah, it was worth it! And in some ways this piece underlies what many find worrisome about the world of high-class escorting (as opposed to the more obvious pitfalls and degradations of less rareified forms of sex work.) That in some ways it's the men like Bodle - lonely, naive, certainly self-deluding - who are a big part of the problem. Because while these men might treat an escort with respect and kindness, they're also buying into the fantasy - allowing them to misrepresent their own actions, and, more to the point, effecting the way they view real-life relationships. Take that telling admission that now he can have "more attractive" women with less effort - do we really think this superficiality and entitlement won't carry over into a normal dating life? To say nothing of "relationships" - which he admits he considers them - centered around pleasing him, fulfilling him, demanding nothing? Sure, good training wheels. And we're not even getting into the sex element.

It's easy, as women, to underestimate the self-esteem issues inherent in this kind of give-and-take. It's funny: when I ask some male friends (the type who'd 'never pay for sex') what they make of men who do, one word always comes up: "pathetic." A guy who can't get sex on his own terms seems, implicitly, more problematic than one who'd indulge in an unhealthy power dynamic, or a current system that allows for the degradation of women (even allowing for a best-case-scenario view of sex work.) And ironically, of course, it's this same kind of judgment that draws men like Bodle into "addictions" like the one he describes - a wish for that kind of validation. And tying self-esteem up with paid sex? Well, as plenty of women have found out, the Pretty Woman scenario rarely works out.

I Was Addicted To Call Girls: A Respected Script Writer Explains How He Succumbed To The Lure Of Paying For Sex [Daily Mail]

The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday, will be released on May 22 in New York and Los Angeles and on demand on the TV network HDNet. It follows an escort named Chelsea who charges $2,000 an hour to act as a client's girlfriend for the night, providing more intimacy than just sex. (In the film's opening scene, Chelsea and her client are shown at a chic Manhattan restaurant discussing the film they just saw - Man on Wire - going back to his apartment and making out, and then having breakfast and reading The New York Times together the next morning.) The story takes place over five days in October 2008, and is partially improvised by the mostly unprofessional actors, who play versions of themselves, like New York magazine staff writer Mark Jacobson, who plays a journalist, and movie critic Glenn Kenny, who plays an escort reviewer. (Some readers may recall that Kenny served as writer David Foster Wallace's editor and sidekick when the duo attended the AVN Awards for a piece for Premiere magazine.) But the casting choice that has garnered the film so much attention is that the main character is played by real-life porn star Sasha Grey.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderburgh explained that he chose Grey precisely because of her porn persona, The Guardian reports. "With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," he said. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."

As Soderbergh put it, Sasha Grey is "not the normal adult film star." Grey is 21, but has appeared in 150 adult films and branded herself as a "new" kind of pornstar since beginning her career at the age of 18. According to the Associated Press, Grey is known for "pushing the boundaries of normal sexual acts," but, "she maintains she's always in control." Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Sasha Grey for the new issue of Rolling Stone explains:

Sasha Grey is the adult industry's reigning princess of porn, a rock & roll 21-year-old with an actual mission statement - "Most of the XXX I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically or visually. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies" - and few taboos.

Grey, who is co-managed by former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro (and appeared in the porn film he directed), has modeled for American Apparel, and sung with the reggae musician Lee "Scratch" Perry. She says she is striving to make porn more artistic; Grigoriadis asserts she is changing the relationship between feminism and porn:

"Porn has been one of feminism's most divisive issues because it hits on such a raw level to so many woman. Here are the fantasies of men, and it's of course better to live out those fantasies through pornography than to try to do them in the real world, but the fact is the real world is impacted by it. Grey says, ‘If you look at me and you think "Here's a woman who's intelligent, cognizant and making her own choices, and you still tell me that what I'm doing is wrong, screw you, because that should end the debate.' "

Grey's appearance in The Girlfriend Experience has been interpreted as the first step in her attempt to go mainstream like former adult actresses Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson, but according to our sister site, Fleshbot, (link NSFW):

If anything, we suspect that Sasha is attempting to remake the notion of what a mainstream star is, and does-much the way she's remade any notions of what an 18-year-old pornstar looks and sounds like .... it's also possible that Sasha could rise to fame in the mainstream cinema while continuing to work as an adult star-perhaps completely remaking our notions of what it means to have crossover appeal.

Though Grey doesn'tactually have sex on screen in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh says that he felt comfortable casting her because "Porn is beyond everywhere now." He told Time Out New York that he thinks prostitution should be legal and does not consider the prostitute in his film a victim. When asked what he would say to someone who has been roped into a life of prostitution, he replied:

Well, there are people for whom that is true. That's not the case with Chelsea any more than it is with Sasha in the adult-film industry. But, yeah, I think whatever agreement two people want to come to about whatever is really none of my business. I don't know what the difference is between that and what I'm doing for Sony Pictures right now [directing Moneyball].

According to the Village Voice review:

Like Godard, Soderbergh views prostitution as the ultimate paradigm for capitalism. But where Godard saw the hooker as a tragic or exploited victim, Soderbergh suggests there are no victims, only failed traders, in the post-Reagan era of DIY capitalism.

And, says Variety's review, the film de-emphasizes the sex involved in Chelsea's work and portrays her as a woman in control of her own get-rich-quick scheme, much like her clients who strive to make a fortune in the world of finance.

From reviews and interviews, it appears Soderbergh was striving for some sort of meta commentary on how capitalism makes prostitutes and porn stars of us all. The johns in the movie delude themselves into thinking they're experiencing a higher level of intimacy with "the girlfriend experience" than they would by just having sex with a prostitute. Similarly, Soderbergh suggests that audience members, who have presumably seen Grey's porn films, will delude themselves into thinking they are experiencing her on a more intimate level by watching her act in a mainstream film rather than a porn film. But by focusing on a high priced escort who chose to get into prostitution, and having her portrayed by an actress described as an atypical pornstar who feels in control of her career, he conveniently ignores the fact that many women in both industries are exploited. Soderbergh is certainly allowed to use the old fantasy of a sex worker who simply loves her work. However, by ignoring the uglier side of the sex trade, he undermines his argument that his film reflects any underlying truths about sex, pornography, or society.

Trailer for The Girlfriend Experience:



Steven Soderbergh On The Girlfriend Experience: 'I Hired Real People And Turned Them Loose' [The Guardian]
Porn Star Sasha Grey Stars In New Soderbergh Film [The Associated Press]
Sasha Grey, The Dirtiest Girl In The World: The Story Behind The Story [Rolling Stone]
Sasha Grey, Crossover Star (NSFW) [Fleshbot]
Steven Soderbergh Interview [Time Out New York]
Soderbergh's Girlfriend Experience Porn-Star Is A True Character [The Village Voice]
The Girlfriend Experience Review [Variety]

Earlier: Dave Navarro Makes Porno Debut
American Apparel Now Sponsoring Bloggers & Porn Stars (NSFW)
Oprah Learns About The Ins-N-Outs Of Legal Prostitution

But by all accounts, Silda and Eliot had a decent marriage before the deluge. Newsweek offers some alternative theories. Susannah Breslin, a writer who is soliciting "Letters from Johns" on an eponymous website writes about some of the letters she received, and most of the prostitute-frequenting married men she's talked to went to hookers because their wives no longer had sex with them or because they got their rocks off on the taboo of it all. "For some men, especially those who are seen as particularly moral or righteous in their public lives (think of all those fallen preachers)," Breslin notes, "Part of the appeal is the fact that it is illegal and a moral transgression in their eyes."

It could be an honest-to-goodness kink, or maybe it's Spitzer's biology! According to Newsweek, men who cheat are "sensation seekers" who have "lower levels of monoamine oxidase A," the chemical that regulates dopamine, the "pleasure" neurotransmitter. Also, the kind of person who is a politician is often incredibly egocentric. Says University of Washington political scientist John Gastil: "For high-profile offices... you have to have a kind of personality where you are very interested in yourself and your personal needs, as well as the needs of others... When the gratification of your desire for social change becomes the justification for so much of what you do in your career, it's not a leap to then say, 'Well, my other desires and needs are equally justified.' You come up with elaborate justifications. 'Hey, 23 hours day I'm working hard for the people of New York. Time for a little me time!'"

And Spitzer will have a ton of "me" time now that he's resigned. The oft-heard moral of this story — to me, at least — is be wary of anyone who goes around crowing about how moral and ethical they are. If Spitzer hadn't claimed to be such a paragon of virtue, the people of New York would probably be more forgiving. Look at former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci or former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. Both left office "disgraced" but returned after a couple years. People forgave them because they never expected them to be particularly moral in the first place. If Spitzer had been honest with himself about his true moral fiber, maybe we wouldn't have seen poor Silda's destroyed visage on our television screens yesterday. She — and we — would have known better.

Dear John [Newsweek]
His Cheating Brain [Newsweek]

Earlier: Enough About Eliot. What About The Hookers?