I just read Who’s Counting: Sexonomics — Prostitutes’ Incomes (popup warning) at ABC news and my brain snapped like a rubber band. I’m going to the gym (today, definitely the punching bag) and I’ll be back after I cool off, but if anyone wants to send me comments on this, please do. I’d love to see what one of my brainy female sex-worker friends would do with this freakonomics-to-sex work model. Talk about confusing sex with marriage… Snip:

“Developing the consequences of their mathematical model, Edlund and Korn argue that the primary reason for the income differential is not the risk sometimes associated with the practice of prostitution but rather that prostitutes greatly diminish their chances for marriage by virtue of their occupation. Men generally don’t want to marry (ex)prostitutes, and so women must be relatively well-compensated in order to forgo the opportunity to marry.

“Employing market concepts, doing some calculus and assuming that “women sell and men buy,” the authors also conclude that prostitution generally declines as men’s incomes increase. Wives and prostitutes are competing “commodities” (in the reductionist view of economists, that is), but wives are distinctly superior in that they can produce children that are socially recognized as coming from the father.

“Thus, if men have more money, they tend to buy the superior good and, at least when wives and prostitutes come from the same pool of women, tend to buy (rent) the cheaper good less frequently. More obvious perhaps is that prostitution generally declines in areas where women’s incomes and opportunities are greater.”

So, does this mean the next time I rent a stud I should save the receipt? Seriously, also: gay sex work makes up a huge economic trade, and it’s totally missing from this lame article… (Thanks to nightbird for the link!)

Update: wow, it’s really true: Audacia Ray (Waking Vixen) is no sleeping beauty, and just pinged me with her incredible crit on the ABC article, and sexonomics, with some amazing brainy sex worker kung-fu (complete with *actual* cost of services and comparisons), snip:

“First of all, the article (and the study it is about, I presume) makes the basic mistake that most media about sex work makes — the assumption that sex workers as a whole are of a particular class that is fairly uniform. Basically, this means that the population being written about isn’t identified in terms of where they exist in the spectrum of sex work possibilities and income level.

(…)

is it any wonder why it is difficult for women to transition out of the sex industry and into a more prosaic (read: unskilled, minimum wage) job? For those not in the know, the class of sex workers that is being written about here is the sort of middle class escort whose rates are generally roughly equivalent to the hourly rate of a lawyer, which depending on location, is probably in the range of $150-300 an hour. However, despite the high hourly rate, it is worth pointing out that sex workers do spend a lot of time outside each hour-long appointment making appointments, advertising, responding to inquiries, doing preparation, traveling, et cetera. Non-billable time, but time spent working nonetheless. So, yes many escorts make a good chunk of money in an hour, but they are not making this by the hour for a 40 hour week.”

Link to The economics of prostitution and marriage.