• Stern wasn't making a flip remark. Sports Illustrator writer Ian Thomsen explains he sent the question to Stern a week ago so he'd have time to think about it. Stern said he really believes it may happen, but "when you look at tennis, and this is the argument against me... As great as the women are, and actually in some cases I think their serves are served at a higher speed than men on the tour, like Serena's (Williams) first serve — you still get the sense that they wouldn't do well on the men's side of the tour... But in basketball, where it's a five-person game and you have zones and you can do a variety of other things — a fast person with a good shot that can play on the team? I think we could see it in the next decade or so ... I'll leave it to the real experts to talk about the muscle factor. But there's going to be a very strong woman who has all the moves, who's going to want to play, and she's going to be good." • If you're sipping from a can of Slim-Fast right now, drop it. Unilever is recalling 10 million cans of ready-to-drink products, regardless of flavor, "best-by" date, or lot code, because they may be contaminated with Bacilus cereus bacteria, which causes diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting. Customers should throw the cans out and contact the company for a refund. • A group of Danish prostitutes say they are offering free sex to delegates at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to protest city officials asking 160 hotels not to arrange prostitutes for guests during the meeting. Copehnhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard also wrote to the 500 delegates asking them not to take the prostitutes up on their offer. A representative for the women said: "It's completely discriminatory. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position when she uses her power to prevent us from carrying out our legal work." •  A 33-year-old bouncer and ex-con has been charged with raping a woman in a Manhattan nightclub. Hunter Dupree allegedly cornered the victim, who was drunk and vomiting, in a bathroom stall. But Dupree's lawyer claims that she made it all up: "You never know who is going to come and say, 'He attacked me.'" •  Car safety experts from Virginia Tech University are hard at work developing a better seat belt for pregnant woman. They are in the process of creating a highly advanced model of the human body to use in testing. For now, experts advise pregnant women make sure the seat belt rests on the bony parts of the body, and that they sit as far from the steering wheel as possible. •  Sgt. Kimberly Munley became a hero when she helped bring down the shooter at Ford Hood, but Munley says her injuries will shorten her career. Officials say they have not yet begun the process of assessing whether or not her wounds will prevent her from rejoining her beat. •  A team of researchers have confirmed what the scientific community has long suspected: female researchers are greatly underrepresented on research articles. Women account for only 10-15% of authorship of the overall reports studied. One researcher suggests this may be because women have "other obligations that prevent them from dedicating so much to research." • Researchers had mothers complete frustrating tasks with each of their same-sex twins separately and found the moms whose negativity was most strongly linked with their child's challenging behavior had the poorest working memory skills. Having a stronger working memory allows parents to reason quickly, rather than lashing out at their kids. • New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate was sentenced today to three years probation and 250 hours of community service for injuring his companion by dragging her through the lobby of his apartment building. He had been accused of slashing her in the face with broken glass while in his apartment, but the judge said he couldn't prove her face was cut in an intentional attack. A Senate committee is still investigating whether to censure, suspend or expel Monserrate, who said he won't resign. • Former Senator Paula Hawkins, who became the first woman elected to a full Senate term without a family political connection in 1980, died today at 82. The Republican backed legislation that helped housewives find jobs after getting divorced and supported equalizing pension benefits for women by taking the years they spent caring for children into account. She also found to get day care for the children of Senate employees and and forced fellow senators to wear bathing trunks in the Senate gym so she could work out there too. • Jody Trautwein, the Alabama pastor who tries to talk Sacha Baron Cohen's character out of being gay in Bruno is running for mayor of Birmingham against 13 other candidates. An election is being held next week to replace Larry Langford, who was convicted of 60 felony counts in a bribery scheme. • The chestnut tree that was outside Anne Frank's window while she was hiding from the Nazis is dying, but today in Amsterdam, a sapling from the tree was planted in Amsterdamse Bos. Other saplings will be sent to schools around the world named after Frank and 11 locations in the U.S., including the White House and the September 11 memorial in New York. •

• PETA has requested that school official replace Uga with a robot, but so far UGA hasn't responded. •  According to new research, men are more likely to be woken up by a fly or the wind than by a crying baby. Wailing infants doesn't even register on the top ten of sounds most likely to disturb their sleep. Not so for women, who may be evolutionarily programed to react to a child's cries, or so suggests the author of the study. •  After being caught with a prostitute, a Swedish man told authorities that he was driven to pay for sex because his wife was pregnant, and he hadn't had sex in five months. He also asked that all letters regarding the incident be sent to his work address, to keep the charges secret from his wife. •  Women in Syria are at the forefront of the country's religious revival, according to the BBC. Many women are turning to prayer groups lead by female preachers, who are often quite conservative. • A 13-year-old girl from Detroit met a 19-year-old man on Facebook, who she allegedly invited over to her house, where they had "sex". She then hid the man in her closet for two days, before her mother finally found him. •  According to a new study out of Australia, women spend more time doing pleasurable activities than men (15 minutes each day) and are more likely to spend time socializing. Researchers also report that men spend six minutes more everyday on activities they dislike, including commuting and work. •  Carlo Pacelli, the lawyer representing Congolese man Patrick Diya Lumumba—who Amanda Knox initially accused of murdering her roommate—called Knox a "diabolical she-devil" in court. He also made mention of her vibrators and rumors of bad hygiene, concluding that she "is unclean on the outside because she was dirty on the inside." Knox's stepfather, who was in court, said Pacelli's statement is a "sexist discourse that sets Italy back 100 years." • On the other side of her family, Amanda Knox's father and stepmother are being investigated for defamation. Last year, they told the Sunday Times that Knox was beaten and brutalized by members of the Italian police force. "It is odd that the timing is coming out now, five days before the end of the trial, and this is supposed to be something that happened over a year ago," said Knox's stepmother. • Mary Arnott of Toronto has been given an honorary diploma from St. Peter's Girls High School on Staten Island for her 100th birthday. She had been in the class of 1925, but dropped out when her mother died during her senior year. "I kept going to night school and more night school and finally got business training and became a secretary to a lawyer, but it wasn't the same," said Arnott. • One of the rites involved in Islam's annual hajj involves pilgrims jogging seven times between two spots in Mecca to reenact Abraham's consort Hagar running between two hills searching for water for her dying son. Shahidah Sharif, an American Muslim on this year's pilgrimage, says clerics should stop telling women to do the run slowly because they are "weaker" or running is immodest. "We are commemorating the act of a woman, someone who made a sacrifice not just for her child but to the building of an entire city," Sharif said. "And she was going through these extremes to provide for her child, without thinking about gender, and here it is now (they're) making it forbidden for women to run." •

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]

A terrific piece in History Today discusses the phenomenon of the "whore memoir," a popular genre of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Writes Julie Peakman,

Real-life prostitutes such as Sally Salisbury, Fanny Murray and Kitty Fisher became the subject of a genre of memoirs now known as Whore Biographies in books such as The Effigies, Parentage, Education, Life, Merry-Pranks and Conversation of the celebrated Mrs Sally Salisbury (1723), Memoirs of the celebrated Miss Fanny M*****(1759) and The uncommon Adventures of Miss Kitty F*****r (1759). Their full names in the titles were tantalisingly omitted, although everyone would have recognised who they were. Gossip around these women and their lovers filled the taverns. Broadsheets and pamphlets rec orded their activities. Songs and poems were written about them and cartoons depicted them.

Famous courtesans - some of them actresses - were among the most famous celebrities of their day, revered by the common people and notorious amongst the nobles who served as their protectors - and their wives. I'm no historian, but the appeal seems obvious: in addition to the lurid taint of sex and scandal the women carried, theirs were tales of social mobility in an era where most people didn't even dream of it, and accounts of their humble origins and fine carriages must have proved irresistible to contemporary readers. One could even read about a fallen woman's life on a moral pretext: an account of Sally Salisbury stabbing her noble protector with a bread knife might have served, ostensibly, as a cautionary tale, but also served to make the courtesan a popular heroine.

The genre, as Peakman tells it, was born with male writers: hacks trying to make a buck with a series of generic, lurid "biographies." Seeing a chance to set the record straight - or at least on their own terms - many of the women decided to cash in with memoirs, and the "blaming and shaming" that ensued is what really made them must-reads. In addition to establishing themselves as good-hearted and merely prey to human frailty, many of these memoirs served as a means of publicly shaming the notable men who'd seduced or cheated them - and slandering rival courtesans. This was surely a level of power most women could never dream of - even those courtesans who'd managed to achieve a level of autonomy and financial independence.

But in addition to the thinly-disguised bold-faces, respectable readers also received a dose of reality. As the women told it, they were not morally reprehensible, but at the mercy of an unforgiving world and in the power of men: many of them related that their careers started as a result of rapes or abandonment that left them with no options; many of the memoirs featured beatings and abuse. As Peg Plunkett put it in her memoir,

The ill usage of Lawless, had changed me to what I never was before. In short, I was become a compleat Coquet. I entertained every one who fluttered about me, I received every present that was offered, accepted every entertainment that was made for me; gave them all the hopes, yet yielded to none. I was disgusted with the man of my heart, therefore gave my heart to none. I looked upon all men as my lawful prey, and wished to punish the crimes of one on the whole sex.

While it would be hard to argue that this genre did a lot to elevate the social dialogue, it's also true that - in combination with a new wave of free-thinking and the works like Mary Wollstonecraft's, the "whore memoir" coincided with a consideration of women as disenfranchised and ill-used rather than morally or intellectually inferior. If they were jaded, these stories seemed to say, it was the fault of men - surely a charge that many less-obviously beholden members of their sex must have silently echoed. Indeed, it's pretty clear that the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope can be traced directly to these memoirs. It's always dangerous to romanticize courtesans, as much today as then - viewing them as liberated mistresses of their own destinies, influencing powerful men and bucking the codes of the time. At the end of the day, these memoirs say, they were still chattel. But by living a life of open "vice," they also had the ability to exploit it openly - and this genre is a marvel of savvy.

Blaming And Shaming In Whores' Memoirs [History Today]

[Hanover, July 24. Image via Getty]

Students play the roles of prostitutes at a protest rally in the northern German city of Hanover on July 24, 2009. The students were drawing attention to the fact that many must work as prostitutes to fund their studies. AFP PHOTO DDP / NIGEL TREBLIN GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read NIGEL TREBLIN/AFP/Getty Images)

As I've looked to illustrate the stories we've written about sex workers — both in terms of rallies for their rights, and women turning to sex work during the recession — I end up scrolling through pictures of women from all walks of life, and from all over the world, who engage in sex work. And as I've read more and more about sex work, the dichotomy between the ways we view women in the developed world and those in the developing world who chose to sell access to their bodies strikes me more and more deeply.

Although many take a default view of sex workers in the developed world as responding to rational choices about the economic valuation of their bodies, there is story after story after story after story after story about how sex workers in "free" societies are often driven by a sense that they have few other options or coerced into the work; meanwhile, an equally nuanced view of sex work in the developing world seems to escape us.

What follows is a sampling of sex workers from around the world: some are posing; some are protesting; some are simply going about their days. Some are more wealthy, or happier-looking than others; some reveal their faces; others camouflage them; still others hide them in shame. Some are exploited, while others seemingly feel more in control of their destinies. But one thing no one can do is predict from whence they came, or where they're going, simply by looking.

A prostitute blows a whistle during a protest commemorating the International Day of Sex Workers in Lima, on June 02, 2009. The demonstration gathered almost 100 people and is one of the first open event of this group of the Peruvian society. (JAIME RAZURI/AFP/Getty Images)

A picture taken on March 6, 2009 in a brothel in Offenbach, western Germany, shows a prostitute waiting for clients. Times are hard down at brothels in Germany, where the current financial crisis has triggered a sharp decline in clientele. (MARTIN OESER/AFP/Getty Images)

An Indian sex worker shouts slogans during a protest march in Kolkata on July 01, 2008 against the proposed amendments to the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act in Indian Parliament. Several hundred sex workers and social workers and activists took part in the march where they burnt the effigies of the Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chaudhary and Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil. (DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AFP/Getty Images)

A sex worker sits in a passageway at the upmarket Xclusive brothel in Sydney's Bondi Junction on July 1, 2008. Upmarket Sydney brothel Xclusive won't be offering papal packages, but it is putting on extra sex workers to provide sexual succour to lonely tourists and Sydneysiders during World Youth Day. The purpose-built Xclusive brothel, which has luxurious rooms complete with double showers, spas, custom-made beds and panic buttons for the sex workers, is expecting a 150-200 percent hike in business during World Youth Day. (GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

Young women who have left their village after being abandoned by their parents for acting as prostitutes to Moroccan UN soldiers sit in front of a house that they rent in the village of Trainou, near Bouake, Ivory Caost's second city and the former capital of the rebel-controlled north, 29 July 2007. Moroccan UN troops in the central city of Bouake have been accused by locals of committing 'sexual abuses'. The UN suspended the activities of the the Moroccan forces contingent in the west African country last month due to the accusation, pending investigation. (Photo credit should read ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images)

A Ukrainian prostitute stands in front of a bed in a brothel in an appartment in Berlin, 12 September 2007. (AXEL SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

Bolivian prostitutes turn into their second day of hunger strike at an AIDS clinic they took over defending their right to work, in El Alto, 12 km from La Paz, on October 23rd, 2007. Some 50 prostitutes went on a hunger strike Monday and threatened to march naked down the streets of El Alto to reopen the bars and strip joints closed down by the local population last week. Many of El Alto's residents last week demonstrated outside the town's 32 bars and strip joints forcing them to close, complaining that they are magnets for lawbreakers and a bad influence on children. (AIZAR RALDES/AFP/Getty Images)

Sex worker Sue Davis is pictured 07 December 2007 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Davis is part of the BC Coalition of Experiential Women, a group defending the issues of sex workers. (Philippe MOULIER/AFP/Getty Images)

A semi-nude Nepali sex worker of the Badi community climbs the gate of the Parliament complex during a protest rally in Singha Durbar, Kathmandu, 22 August 2007. Police in Nepal detained 13 men and women who tried to strip in front of parliament here to protest the decades-old practice of forcing girls from their community into prostitution. Members of the poor Badi community are one of the most disadvantaged groups in the country. For generations, many have been forced into the sex trade because of a lack of other options. (STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)

IPSWICH, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 12: A prostitute who gave her name as Lou talks to reporters (unseen) as she stands on a street corner December 12, 2006 in Ipswich, England. Police, who were already investigating the murders of three prostitutes whose bodies were found earlier this month, found two more bodies today and are warning sex workers to stay off the streets. The killings recall memories of the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, serial killer Peter Sutcliffe who admitted to killing 13 women, mostly prostitutes, in the 1970s. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

A woman prostitute, drug addict and HIV postive (C) who wish to keep her identity anonymous, smokes a cigarette in a street of a shanty town in Phnom Penh on June 10, 2008. The United States said that Cambodia still needs to do more to fight human trafficking, even though an annual State Department report said the nation had made progress. (NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)

ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN - AUGUST 10: Khazak prostitutes prepare for the evening ahead as they walk outside their brothel home August 10, 2006 in Almaty in the central Asian country of Kazakhstan. Fifteen years after the breakup of the former USSR, the millions of Muslims living between the Caspian Sea and China, who for decades found themselves repressed under Communism, are experiencing an economic and religious revival. Following the August 1991 abortive coup attempt in Moscow and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan declared independence on December 16, 1991. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo: Prostitutes dance at a centre run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in preparation for World Aids Day, 29 November 2006, in Kinshasa. The 'Biso na Biso' centre in the run down district of Massina provides medicine, health care, and education programmes for sex workers. (LIONEL HEALING/AFP/Getty Images)

Amsterdam. A picture taken 23 April 2004 shows a man standing in front of the window of a prostitute in the Red District of Amsterdam. (TOUSSAINT KLUITERS/AFP/Getty Images)

A group of prostitutes from the Merced neighborhood stand a protest in front of local assembly 04 October 2007 in Mexico City, complaining for the arrests they suffer from police. (ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images)

CAMDEN, NJ - FEBRUARY 17: A woman involved in the sex industry waits on a street corner February 17, 2005 in Camden, New Jersey. Camden, a crime ridden city in the south of New Jersey, has both a high prostitution rate and an escalating HIV/AIDS rate among its young people. A New York man infected with a highly drug-resistant and possibly aggressive strain of the AIDS virus has galvanized health officials around the country to consider the possibility of what some people are calling a 'Super HIV strain.' (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Gisenyi, RWANDA: Adeline, 19, prostitute, stands at the doorway of her house 28 April 2006 in Gisenyi, Rwanda. Forced into prostitution after losing their parents during the 1994 genocide, some 200 women have joined an association to fight AIDS and try to build themselves a new future. (JOSE CENDON/AFP/Getty Images)

PADUA, ITALY: A group of prostitutes took to the streets in Padua, 16 May 2007 to protest against a new fine on clients caught in the act, which is aimed at cleaning up the streets of this northeastern Italian city. The 30 or so demonstrators also distributed leaflets calling for a concerted fight 'against sexual traffickers and not those who ply their trade freely.' Banner at (C) reads- The Symbol of Love-. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

BEIJING, CHINA - JUNE 21: Women hide their faces as police raid an entertainment center which is suspected to have prostitution business on June 21, 2006 in Beijing, China. Authorities have launched campaigns to crack down on prostitutions in the city. According to state media, male and female prostitution, both of which are illegal in China, are nonetheless widespread. According to a draft guideline released by the Ministry of Health, prostitutes are being made the focus of the ministry's latest efforts to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

File photo taken March 30, 2007 shows a prostitute working on the street in central Oslo. On February 6, 2009, and a month after it came into force, a Norwegian law banning the purchase of sex has nearly eliminated street prostitution, but for the few sex workers remaining, working conditions have become much tougher. 'The clients are extremely nervous. Most of them don't dare come here,' says Nadia, a 22-year-old from Oslo who has been a sex worker for eight years. Since January 1, men who buy sex face up to six months in jail, pay a fine or face both. The law prohibits the buying of sex but not the sale, so the prostitute goes free. (TRULS BREKKE/AFP/Getty Images)

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL: (L-R) Brazilian prostitutes Regina, Jane Eloy and Maria model clothes from the fashion brand DASPU, a firm supported by the Non-Governmental Organization Da Vida (To the Life), which supports the project of a new group of prostitutes in Rio de Janeiro, 17 December 2005. DASPU has planned to act as a support to old prostitutes at the end of their professional lives. (ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP/Getty Images)

SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA: With policeman looking on, South Korean prostitutes sit wearing white mourning clothes take part in a protest rally against new enforcement laws targetting human traffickers, in front of a government office complex building in Seoul, 06 December 2004. Dozens of people gathered to protest a government move to regulate and restrict the local sex industry — including a tough anti-prostitution law which took place in September. (JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images)

Mombasa, KENYA: Photo taken 20 June 2007 shows a brothel run by a number of prostitutes with one of them lying on a bed next to a child, a product of the trade, at Kenya's coastal town of Mombasa where sex-tourism, increasingly involving minors, has become rampant. Between 10 and 15 thousand under-aged girls are now involved in the growing industry that has prompted the Kenya government and hotel owners and managers to introduce a code that must be adopted by hotel operators along the Kenyan coast to prevent the prostitution of minors, many of them girls, by denying suspected under-age clients that are unaccompanied by a related adult admission without proof of age. (TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images)

DUBI, CZECH REPUBLIC - OCTOBER 25: Prostitutes attempt to lure passing motorists from the display window of a roadside brothel October 25, 2003 in Dubi, Czech Republic. Prostitution is big business along the Czech Republic's borders with Germany and Austria, and the country has become a major transit point for criminal gangs trafficking women from eastern Europe into western Europe. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA: Estefani, a sexual worker who is member of the female soccer team 'Estrellas de la Linea' goes back to her 'laboral activities', 23 September 2004 in Guatemala City. The team denounced it has been discriminated by authorities after being expelled from the female soccer local championship because of their profession. (ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)

TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Taiwan prostitutes, holding hats and masks of their deceased colleagues, protest outside the presidential building in Tapei, 17 September 2004 accusing President Chen Shui-bian of depriving their professional rights. They charged that Chen, when serving as Taipei mayor, refused to follow a 1998 decision of Taipei city council to postpone ending legal prostitution by two years as the immediate crackdown that year had forced many of them out of jobs and driven some into debts. (SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)

An Iraqi mother (R) with her 14 years-old daughter, both of them prostitutes, wait for clients at their home in Baghdad 07 September 2003. With the end of the Saddam Hussein's regime, many Iraqi women prostitute themselves to survive. AFP PHOTO/ Thomas COEX (Photo credit should read THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images)

Greek prostitutes argue during a protest held by more than 50 prostitutes in front of a brothel in Athens 04 August 2003. The women protested the plans by the Athens municipality to shut down at least 15 brothels for being too close to churches and schools. (FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images)

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: A South African prostitute waits for a client on a Johanneburg street corner 23 August 2002, despite the local police effort to 'clean' the city, before the World Summit on Sustainable Development starting 26 August. (Photo credit: YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images)

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - JULY 03: A Prostitute works on Auckland's Karangahape Road, Thursday. The new law passed legalizing prostitution makes it easy for girls to work the streets during the day as well as the night. (Photo by Dean Purcell/Getty Images)

Two teenage prostitutes ... wait in detention October 25, 2000 in the Juvenile police office in Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia. The girl in the middle is 7 months pregnant. There are an estimated 3000 to 4000 street children in Mongolia, a country where 36% of families live below the poverty level. About 20 nongovernmental shelters in Ulaan Bataar try to combat the problem by offering hot meals and places to wash and sleep. The shelters also encourage the children to attend a special school since many of them have no formal education. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Newsmakers)

Paris, FRANCE: French prostitutes demonstrate, 18 March 2006 in Paris, during a 'Hooker Pride' march in protest at a three-year-old old law banning them from soliciting on the street. Banner reads 'passiv soliciting = activ repression'. (FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/Getty Images)

JAKARTA, INDONESIA - JULY 10: A prostitute shows an outreach worker how she uses a condom July 10, 2004 in Jakarta, Indonesia. A recent report issued by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS states that six provinces are now being classified as badly affected with a serious increase in 2003 among drug users and sex workers. The 15th International AIDS conference will be held in Bangkok beginning next week. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Earlier: Can't Buy Her Love
German Sex Workers Feel The Pinch Of The Recession
Helping Women Help Themselves
The Problem With The "Happy Hooker" Myth
When Did Sex Work Become Less Stigmatized Than "Menial" Labor?

[All images via Getty Images]

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]

[Sydney, June 2. Image via Getty]

Sydney sex workers 'Ivy' (C) and 'Mish' (R) celebrate International Whores Day in Sydney on June 2, 2009. Sex workers angry at the cost of advertising in local papers staged a protest outside the New South Wales parliament. International Whores day, held on the second of June, commemorates the day in 1975 when a group of sex workers staged a sit-in at a church in Lyon, France to protest discrimination against sex workers AFP PHOTO / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

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"Les Insoumises" were a very particular brand of courtesan who managed to exist in a specific window of time before laws cracked down, "their trade became rigidly codified" and their existence became a shameful open secret. It's from this period that our idea of the classic 19th century courtesan springs, what Janet Flanner called "a venal, public pretty woman of enormous social influence who was customarily kept by a kind of cartel - three millionaires or two dukes - or by one royalty." In Gigi the old women reminisce about this golden age of the mistress. Famous courtesans like Liane de Pougy or Anna Deslions were as well-known as any celebrity, and afforded a certain respect.

However, it's all too easy to romanticize these women. From La Traviata to Camille we are inundated with images of exquisitely manicured, wonderfully educated and refined creatures who bend men to their wills and exist as sexy eminences grises. While, yes, they did seize a measure of power for themselves in a men's world, and managed to have more autonomy than the average woman — certainly better lives than the average prostitute — they were still very much at the mercy of their powerful protectors. What's more, even during their golden age Les Insoumises were vulnerable, due to their visibility: "Le livre des courtisanes: archives secrètes de la police des moeurs [1861-1876]," by Gabrille Houre provides a comprehensive dossier of the exhaustive tabs agents and informers kept on anyone deemed Une Insoumise. And then too, it was a term people came to throw around loosely as a pejorative, tarring any reasonably independent with the backhanded insult of high-class courtesan; even respected actress Sarah Bernhardt rated a police file in the "Insoumises" dossier, a useful blackmail tool.

It is a fine line, it seems, between respecting the gumption and courage of women in a very different time, and romanticizing what was, at the end of the day, still an unenviable existence. It does seem like the flippant use of the term "courtesan" — as in the case of "international escorts" like Jet Set Lara or Kathleen Glyde— can serve to obscure the realities of a profession that should not be glamorized and should certainly not be linked to some grand historical tradition, given how times have changed. While Les Insoumises were a fascinating subculture, and certainly notable case of historical lemonade-making, it's important to look beyond the glamor — for their sakes, M. Lacroix, as well as our own.

Les Insoumises, France's Rebellious Female Courtesans [IHT]

If you are selling your time, undivided attention, and the (unspoken) offer of sexual entertainment, you're an escort. If you're selling a specific sexual activity for a certain amount of money, you're a prostitute. If you won't have sex with the man you're dating unless he buys you an expensive dinner, you're a (relatively cheap) prostitute.

Guides To Call Girl Work Out [The Sun]
Related: The Internet Escort's Handbook

Perhaps those posts will lead Ms. Kirchner's mother to a deeper understanding of the oldest profession and her daughter's reasons for choosing it. But, says Morgan Winter on the Utne Reader's website, "There seems to be two basic motivations for writing about one's tenure as a hooker, neither educational. The prostitute either wants to glorify or vilify the industry and its consumers. Either of these seems simplistic and disingenuous. After all, not only are we talking about the oldest profession, we're also trying to understand arguably the most complicated physiological aspect of nature—sex—through books about themes that, if authored by anybody other than former prostitutes, would fall under the 'teen' section in the local library." Even with a more nuanced view of prostitution, I can't imagine any mother would be particularly thrilled to discover that her daughter was a hooker. I got an awkwardly scolding phone call from my mother when I wrote about foreskins. I can't even imagine what she'd say if I told her I touched them for a living!

Insanely Sane Conversation With My Mom [Bound, Not Gagged]
The True Stories Of O[Utne]

Related: Young Beauty Sells Her Body, Breaks Our Hearts
a href="http://gawker.com/5006394/diane-sawyer-rats-out-hooker-to-her-parents">Diane Sawyer Rats Out Hooker To Her Parents

Ed Note: We hear about and see so many stories that we can't find the time to comment on that we're gonna try something new: "Leftovers", a daily "accounting" of the stuff we had to leave behind. Let us know if you like it, and, obviously, feel free to click through on the stories and flesh them out for everybody.