That was a fascinating, well-written, and yet incredibly sad read. It's easy to lose touch in the relative comfort of the first world, both geographically as well as virtually. I loved the comparison to the red light district. Desperately lonely divorced Western men spending a fortune on these young foreign girls and boys for companionship and sexual gratification, and the young folks drawn into whoring out their bodies over the internet just to make rent and buy food. Or, evidently, to squander their money "Gangnam Style" on luxuries to feel rich. The whole thing reaches a level of depravity almost to the point of absurdity. Interestingly enough, Romania turns out to have among the fastest average broadband connection speeds in the world [1].
I see it as basic economics, with a history going back as far as biblical times. The real first world problem is looking at this as depraved when in fact it's a real business, with a real demand, that makes money versus some shitty startup.
Yes, but those are two very different things. I don't see anyone getting hurt or forced to do anything they don't want to do. I see this as strippers in a gentlemen's club, there is demand and it's a way to make a living. Let's take it all the way to prostitution, I think the trafficking and even enslavement of some of these women is bad, but if a grown adult woman wants to provide that as a service then I support her decision. Who the hell am I to judge how anyone makes their living?
My point is that (1) "has been going on for ages" and (2) "is an economic activy" are not sufficient qualifiers to show that something is (3) OK to go one and/or good and/or beneficial to society.
(Which was part of the argument the parent made).
I used the slave trade as an counter-example to his point, because while it qualifies (1) and (2), most people will agree that it's not OK.
Seems to me that the story was mainly upside. Romania gets foreign cash and internet infrastructure. Lonely guys in north america get some companionship (real friendship in the case of the southern gay guy who is trying to come out to his family) and young romanians earn some money.
Is this ideal? Hardly. But you know it will happen, and the models seem to be being treated decently.
>What is beneficial to society is none of your competence, so you would do wise to refrain from such comments
Perhaps you are not current with this ancient Greek notion called "democracy". Its premise is that "what is beneficial to society" is _everybody's_ competence and everybody can, nay should, have his say on the matter.
(Of course, there are other trains of thought, from Plato to Nietzche and Hitler, that run counter to this idea, perhaps you subscribe to them. Or to some second-rate, provincial, version of them, like Rand).
In any case, it would be wise for you to refrain from silly advice such as the above.
No. Sex trade is never "basic economics". Sexuality is always a big part of the identity, so much so, that violating sexual self-determination leaves victims scarred for life. And yes, sex-cams count. Some models might enjoy this, or are neutral about it. Others don't have an alternative or are even forced, directly or indirectly to do it.
All this "basic economics" talk tries to obscure the exploitation that is necessary to provide sex labor at "acceptable" prices.
> All this "basic economics" talk tries to obscure the exploitation that is necessary to provide sex labor at "acceptable" prices. Rape is rape, whatever you pay the pimp.
Good grief. Good or bad, porn and prostitution are not rape crimes and shouldn't be passed off as such.
Exactly this. I feel as thought op's definition of rape is slightly skewed or that all sex work is viewed as involuntary. Which is not the case. Some use it as a supplementary income, some as their primary job and others may use it to valid their self worth. These do not equate to rape.
Is there such a considerable difference between being coerced into sex using the threat of a gun held to one's temple and being coerced into sex using the threat of starving tomorrow?
Granted, not all sex work is involuntary, but don't delude yourself thinking it's a voluntary choice in poor countries.
"The threat of starving tomorrow" is not a condition invented by ruthless capitalist patriarchs or whatever the claptrap of the day is, it's the basis of the human condition for all but the last ~20 minutes of the species' time on this planet.
The fact that in most rich countries we generally, mostly can expect to eat tomorrow no matter what happens is still a state of unimaginable luxury for a large portion of the planet's population (although quickly shrinking).
The idea that everybody should be free to do (and especially not do) whatever they please without ever suffering adverse consequences is still a fantasy for most, even in the rich part of the world. Using it as some sort of objective universal yardstick next to having a gun to your head is lacking proportions on an epic scale.
> "The threat of starving tomorrow" is not a condition invented by ruthless capitalist patriarchs
No, but when ruthless capitlist patriarchs or whatever intervene with their money in order to maintain its status quo, the difference begins to fade.
Or did you think the girls came up with the money for the studios by themselves? That unless they come up with a steady cashflow for the studio, they're not back wherever they came from?
Yes, there's a legitimate business need for what they do, but I find it difficult to shake off the feeling that the investors behind the studios would be so quick to invest in, say, education.
You're changing the subject. You were comparing the coercion by direct deadly force to coercion by needing a job to eat.
I'm sure the people who run such a studio are not God's best children, but if they're not threatening physical violence, it's not comparable to threatening physical violence, not matter how much you'd like them to invest in schools instead.
I'm not saying the people who run such a studio are doing the coercion directly, obviously. They're simply taking advantage of it. The fact that the advantage they are taking is primarily economic in nature does little to change the ethical matters. They act as intermediaries to people who gain advantages that are not only economic.
> No, but when ruthless capitlist patriarchs or whatever intervene with their money in order to maintain its status quo, the difference begins to fade.
What are you talking about here? Bribing regulators to keep the girls poor? That would certainly be an issue if was happening, but I don't think it is.
> Or did you think the girls came up with the money for the studios by themselves? That unless they come up with a steady cashflow for the studio, they're not back wherever they came from?
What are you talking about? This whole line seems very incoherent.
> Yes, there's a legitimate business need for what they do, but I find it difficult to shake off the feeling that the investors behind the studios would be so quick to invest in, say, education.
I don't think so; I think they're just chasing whichever investment gives the best return on their money, and if that were education they'd be in there like a shot. (There are certainly plenty of scumbags in the education industry if that's where you were going with this)
> Bribing regulators to keep the girls poor? That would certainly be an issue if was happening, but I don't think it is.
In Romania? Wanna bet?
> What are you talking about? This whole line seems very incoherent.
This whole lines seems pretty coherent to me. Videochat studios in Eastern Europe (or at least in Romania, the one I'm more familiar with) are not owned by the men and women who star in the shows (obviously). Opening one is a pretty big investment, too. Typically, the "employees" aren't legally employed there, either, so there are no social benefits, no medical insurance and so on.
The way we see it from outside, this is a legit business ran because there's a demand for it and that's it. The way it actually happens is this is a shady business which, were it not to draw on a pool of poor people who cannot afford any other option, would fail.
Most of the girls who do this aren't doing it on Western terms, where they figured out going to college certainly doesn't pay off as well as this. They're doing it on Eastern terms, where they figured out it's either this or starving.
Edit: unless it wasn't bloody obvious already, the vast majority of videochat studios are actually brothels, or act as covers for brothels, as prostitution is outlawed in most of Eastern Europe.
> The way we see it from outside, this is a legit business ran because there's a demand for it and that's it. The way it actually happens is this is a shady business which, were it not to draw on a pool of poor people who cannot afford any other option, would fail.
Pretty much all industries dependent on low-wage labor (and, arguably, the entire system of wage labor) would fail were they not to draw on a pool of poor (before considering wage labor) people who cannot afford any better option.
Oh, I'm sure many would if they could. I mean, that's basically how the people-trafficking approach to running one of these businesses works; you bribe people so that the girls are in the country illegally and therefore can't insist on being paid properly etc. But the example in this article doesn't seem to be doing that, and in any case there's no reason to assume this is any more or less an issue with camshows than with fruit picking or mining or accountancy.
> Videochat studios in Eastern Europe (or at least in Romania, the one I'm more familiar with) are not owned by the men and women who star in the shows (obviously). Opening one is a pretty big investment, too.
Well, sure. Like a farm or a mine or anything else. I don't see how this is relevant to the rest of your argument.
> Typically, the "employees" aren't legally employed there, either, so there are no social benefits, no medical insurance and so on.
That's definitely an issue. But again, it's an issue in any industry; nothing specific to camgirls here.
> were it not to draw on a pool of poor people who cannot afford any other option, would fail.
Any business in a poor country is like that. But a simplistic response like refusing to buy products made in poor countries hurts those same people more than ignoring their plight. (Which is not to say that there aren't better options than ignoring them - but those options are not obvious or easy. Did you have a concrete suggestion for how to make these people's lives better? Because I don't think making camsites illegal would do that).
> Most of the girls who do this aren't doing it on Western terms, where they figured out going to college certainly doesn't pay off as well as this. They're doing it on Eastern terms, where they figured out it's either this or starving.
I doubt that - two years ago this option didn't exist, but very few people were starving, even in Eastern Europe. I'm not saying the alternative is good - we might be talking 14-hour days in the fields or similar - but it will exist and won't be starvation. I think many of these girls aren't being coerced because there's no need to coerce them - this career is genuinely a better option than the available alternatives. (And again, yes that sucks, but what's the solution? Not banning what's currently the best option they have)
> Edit: unless it wasn't bloody obvious already, the vast majority of videochat studios are actually brothels, or act as covers for brothels, as prostitution is outlawed in most of Eastern Europe.
It's pretty clear the one in the article isn't. And if a videochat studio can make the kind of money the article claims, while remaining just a videochat studio and operating within the law, why wouldn't they do that?
The phrase about assumptions being the mother of all fuck-ups comes to mind :-).
> I doubt that - two years ago this option didn't exist, but very few people were starving, even in Eastern Europe.
Have you actually been there, or are you just talking about it from Wikipedia? Two years ago this option didn't exist, so yes, many of the girls who are now doing videochat would have simply gone into prostitution. And, yes, two years ago, a lot of people were on the brink of starvation, just like today. It doesn't go to the levels you see in Africa because the communities tend to be more heterogenous in terms of wealth distribution, but you do see villages where up to 20-30% of the population is literally living without any income and without any residence.
Before you move to "well yeah but they can work", do remember that (at least in Romania and, if I remember correctly, Bulgaria and Serbia), you need a valid ID in order to be employed, and you need a residence in order to get a valid ID. No residence, no work.
Also, I think it was obvious that I wasn't referring to this article specifically, just like the other posters in this thread were not referring to this article specifically, but to videochat studios in general.
> Have you actually been there, or are you just talking about it from Wikipedia?
Been there, have friends who emigrated from there.
> Two years ago this option didn't exist, so yes, many of the girls who are now doing videochat would have simply gone into prostitution. And, yes, two years ago, a lot of people were on the brink of starvation, just like today.
Even if you're right, that makes my argument stronger, not weaker. If these videochat businesses are employing girls who would otherwise go into prostitution, surely that makes them a good thing? Surely that means making them illegal would be a really bad idea. Surely these businesses are if anything empowering the girls (a little bit), because they now have (a few) more and (slightly) better choices than they would have two years ago.
> If these videochat businesses are employing girls who would otherwise go into prostitution, surely that makes them a good thing?
Are you being intentionally thick? These businesses aren't employing girls who would otherwise go into prostitution. In the absence of proper regulations, they simply act as legit proxies and money laundering networks for prostitution, and this status quo is maintained using bribe money from pimps, many of whom are either officials or financers of officials.
Well, clearly some girls are actually videochatting rather than just using it as cover for prostitution. Clearly some girls are being employed in jobs that didn't exist prior to these businesses. And the article shows that at least some of these businesses really are exactly what they claim to be (and really why wouldn't they be? It's profitable enough). "It can be used for money laundering" could be given as an argument against basically any possible business.
I'm sorry, the difference in cultural context is far too high for me to be able to properly explain this. You have a very optimistic view about how sexual exploitation actually works.
I highly doubt that most johns would be able to tell if they are raping a girl or if they are using a prostitute.
A little hint: Forced Prostitution does not necessarily mean that the girls run around with bruises all the time. Flirting behavior or turning on a customer isn't proof there is no coercion involved. Pimps do believe in employee education, you know...
> I highly doubt that most johns would be able to tell if they are raping a girl or if they are using a prostitute.
There is a massive ethical (and I believe legal) difference between having sex with someone who you believe is consenting (even if just for money), and having sex with someone who you believe is not consenting.
Prostitution is mostly rape and should be regarded as such.
Underage prostitutes (which are extremely common in Europe) can't consent.
Drug addicts can't really consent.
Illegal immigrants can't really consent (because they can't refuse).
Prostitutes that are kept in a slave-like relationship can't really consent.
In richer countries the price you would have to pay even a low-income woman to do this would be so high, that almost noone would pay it. This "economic" gap is then filled by employers who manage to hold the "cost of labor" down by any means neccessary.
Yes, there is such a thing as completely voluntary prostitution. But the johns can't tell which from which. Especially in the lower price ranges you just have to assume a certain degree of exploitation and abuse from pimps if not from the johns...
"You better..." signals hat you don't agree because the quoted line does not fit your worldview. Meybe "You better" come with some support for whatever point you want to make?
Well, they do come to the conclusion that sex trafficking involves tens of thousands of minors a year in Europe. That's enough to make me sick. It means that there must be hundreds of thousands of men who pay for raping minors, since technically having sex with unconsenting minors is called rape in most countries.
On the other hand, prostitution isn't considered an honorable thing, and exploiting/raping minors is even more frowned upon, even these conservative numbers are "extremely common".
That argument is an abusive and deliberate attempt at misunderstanding my point. That I believe a big portion of all prostitutes are rape victims simply does not make a prostitute out of any individually rape victim.
Rape, or sexual abuse, has a large variation. From simple touching (minors) to fatal gang rapes.
But there is really no ambiguity: Having sex with a woman against her own will - even a prostitute, a passed out drunk, or your own wife - is rape.
Should renting out the "rape privilege" make rape legal?
"Rape is rape, whatever you pay the pimp" seemed to imply that you made no distinction between prostitutes and rape victims. Sorry for the misunderstanding. It seems unlikely to me that a "big portion of all prostitutes are rape victims" but I guess we are stuck with anecdotal evidence at this point and discussing it further won't help.
There is a big uncertainty about how much prostitution is involuntary, and to the degree of coercion involved. There can be no doubt however, that coercion is a visible and very significant part of the sex industry. So much so that no "customer" can assume a particular prostitute to be a consenting adult beyond reasonable doubt.
Part of the reason they squander the money is similar to many from former Soviet countries. The Soviets took wealth from people to redistribute it. Especially towards the end of the Soviet Union many people were exceptionally poor and struggling to get food without using the black market. For many people out towards that end of the world, a sense of enjoying what you have today because it might all be taken away from you tomorrow is pretty much the norm.
I think it's more simple than that. The idea of "nobody thinks about tomorrow" is common in the Philippines as well. I think it's more a lack of education. When you haven't had money and your parents haven't had money, then you don't really know how to handle it.
It's the same with family planning. Since having lots of kids is the norm, people don't think much of it (not to mention that birth control is an extra expense for people already tight on cash.)
It's not until someone can break out numbers, charts, graphs and help these people understand the basics of thriving in a modern economy that they will begin to make better choices.
Also, are people in the U.S. really that much different? How many people have the skills and discipline to properly plan for retirement or an emergency? Sure, many people are just scraping by. For many people in the middle class, their monthly budget just swells to eat up their pay. I remember a lot of friends right out of high school landing well paying labor jobs (while everyone else was poor and going to college) and blowing it all on trucks and big boy toys. This is an extreme example, but what percentage of high paid pro athletes go broke within 5 years after they quit playing? Big lotto winners?
Budgeting is one of those life tasks which can be very simple, but still difficult for many people. Time management is another. The brain sometimes has difficulty dealing with these abstract things. These people don't do well unless you constrain them. Their budgets are constrained by what they bring home. Their time management is constrained by punching a clock and given specific tasks to do within certain times. Show up at X time. Take a lunch at X time. Leave at X time. In between, stand in X spot and deal with customers. Give them a vague job like running a business where they have to plan their own day and they would probably fall apart.
> It's not until someone can break out numbers, charts, graphs and help these people understand the basics of thriving in a modern economy that they will begin to make better choices.
You are assuming that they don't make good choices for their situation. In many poor countries, having many children is a cultural norm borne out of necessity: Someone without many children becomes a burden on the rest of the community when they grow old and/or sick, or is left to die.
Blowing your money on other stuff and having children is often two very different things - for many in the developing world, stretching their economy to the breaking point to raise more children is exercising discipline to plan for retirement or an emergency.
I grew up poor, well educated, and knew how to budget. I just chose not to when I was younger. When you're relatively rich it's very easy to convey wealth. You only have to look at the well educated, trust funded hipsters to see they will be alright. When you're poor your means to convey success are limited to material things. I was involved with a program to get poor people bank accounts. In the end the bank (American) slowly bled them dry with charges and fees.
One thing I do have to give credit to the poor, at least they recognize money is fleeting and bullshit. It's the personal connections that will help you along. I have many upper middle class friends who can't change a tire, can't snake a toilet, and don't know how to do physical labour. One dropped a coffee meet last week because it conflicted with his tennis match.
I would speculate that "cam girls" simply have on average a lower control for delayed gratification (i.e. they failed the Stanford marshmallow experiment).
There are "sex cam studios" in every country, including America. There are several in Arizona and Nevada. They're just like the coworking spaces us devs/designers have available to us -- space to work in, a solid internet connection, and a network of people in the same industry as you, some of whom will pair up to serve "clients" whose needs are too much for one "contractor".
> They're just like the coworking spaces us devs/designers have available to us
This is one of the more out of touch bits of false equivalency I've seen on HN recently, and that's saying something. It's a bit of pop philosophy that says that sex workers are just like any other service provider. However, it totally ignores the psychology and power differentials in the industry. In America and especially in developing countries. The point 'LukeWalsh makes about child sex workers is relevant. The phat answer is: "well that's different, because children can't consent and nobody can consent on their behalf." Neat and clean. But the psychology that leads someone to push their child into sex work is not susceptible to a neat answer or pop philosophy. Whatever psychological phenomenon is at play, might a lesser but qualitatively similar sort of phenomenon be at play with less extreme examples of sex workers?
I'm guessing probably because the secular crowd doesn't ascribe so much power significance to sexual matters. They don't see a girl being forced to do sex work (of any variety) as having been exploited in any way. What's interesting, I suppose, is that a new form feminism brewing (especially among women of younger age) shares these values -- they see sex work just like any other work to get money, and so the sex work is just fine and should be let as is according to them.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this if you have any.
This is a messy topic. If you take two liberal/secular/progressive moral atoms -- "there is nothing intrinsically wrong with selling sex" and "sexual coersion is always wrong" -- you immediately arrive at a conundrum. How do you have legalized prostitution without allowing for sexual coersion? Even regulated, people will still enter into the trade who are being coerced by circumstance: starving children, foreclosure, medical expenses... just because someone finds some things worse than sex work does not mean they truly find it acceptable.
(You can have other discussions about whether people should be coerced into selling shoes, but I think sex is special enough to warrant its own discussion.)
ETA: by 'starving children', I meant if your children are starving, you might 'voluntarily' enter the sex trade yourself to feed them. Constraining the discussion to consenting adults.
> How do you have legalized prostitution without allowing for sexual coersion? Even regulated, people will still enter into the trade who are being coerced by circumstance: starving children, foreclosure, medical expenses...
These are effectively answered by the broader liberal project: no one should ever be starving, homeless, or denied medical attention. When you take away these subtler forms of coercion, you have a far easier time finding plausible the notion that the sex worker in front of you is doing it willingly.
On top of this, our puritanism is being slowly--glacially slowly, but still--eroded away. Once that is sufficiently weak, we can make the industry more transparent and accountable, making it possible to do sex work safely, legally, and because you want to, without risk of future stigma.
We're not going to fix it overnight, but the various projects are moving along and a surprising amount of them are already in motion: none of the things I've said are unknown to mainstream awareness, regardless of the average person's opinion on them, and the arc of history is positive from a global perspective.
The modern generation of feminism has a complicated relationship with sex. On one hand, it's generally sex-positive. On the other hand, there is a much greater willingness than with previous generations of feminists to acknowledge that men and women don't perceive sex in the same way. There is still a deep-seated feeling that sex is something men take or earn and women give up.[1] That feeling is what makes sex work, if not inherently exploitive, at least inherently susceptible to being exploitive.
[1] Go to Manhattan and talk to a bunch of 25-35 year olds. Count how many men are sick of just "giving it up" and want to get married versus how many women express a similar view.
>Go to Manhattan and talk to a bunch of 25-35 year olds. Count how many men are sick of just "giving it up" and want to get married versus how many women express a similar view.
I am a woman in my 30s and I have never ever once in my life heard anyone else use the term "give it up." I am going to go out on a limb and say people just don't talk like that. Not the women I associate and have continued to associate with through my 20s and 30s.
Rather than living up to the stereotype of commitment-phobic bachelors, modern men reported that they fell in love just as often as women, were just as likely to believe that marriage is “forever,” and scarcely bit when asked whether they'd prefer to “just date a lot of people.” But most shocking was how many of the single men wanted to settle down—and how willing they were to lower their standards to make that happen. A whopping 31 percent of adult men said they’d commit to a person they were not in love with—as long as as she had all the other attributes they were looking for in a mate—and 21 percent said they'd commit under those same circumstances to somebody they weren't sexually attracted to. The equivalent numbers for women were far lower.
the percentage of men saying "yes" to imperfect committment was actually highest among men in their 20s, almost 40 percent of whom said they'd commit without love (compared with 22 percent of women).
I'm using that phrase not because I've heard it recently, but because it conveys the nature of the sentiment I've seen. Many women, at least by my anecdotal experience, see sex as something that they give up, and are expected to, after certain checkpoints in a dating relationship. I've never seen a man express this particular feeling.
I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country. At least anecdotally, women express a noticeably greater frustration with not being in a committed relationship than in other parts of the country. In a way it's quite the opposite phenomenon of what I saw in my engineering days, with a disproportionately male crowd dissatisfied by their dating prospects. However, there is a palpable difference in the attitude of the two groups towards sex. The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.
>Many women, at least by my anecdotal experience, see sex as something that they give up, and are expected to, after certain checkpoints in a dating relationship.
This is absolutely absurd and I don't know what kind of women you are hanging out with. I've had frank honest women to women discussions about sex and relationships and this sentiment has never come up. EVER.
>I mention Manhattan for a reason: it's got an unbalanced gender ratio and the highest percentage of single men in the country
>The men were upset they weren't having sex. The women date, and have sex if they want, but are somewhat resentful about it because they'd rather settle down.
The survey I presented above does not support this.
Nearly 43 percent of single black men said they’re looking for a long-term partner that can eventually lead to marriage. That’s according to a new poll of nearly 1,100 African-Americans out today from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
The survey asked questions about a wide range of topics, including communities, finance and dating. Respondents between 18 and 49 years old who were divorced, widowed or never married were asked whether they were currently seeking a long-term romantic commitment. Roughly half of the men said yes; just a quarter of the women said the same.
> This is absolutely absurd and I don't know what kind of women you are hanging out with. I've had frank honest women to women discussions about sex and relationships and this sentiment has never come up. EVER.
YMMV. Among other occasions, I was just talking about this subject with my wife the other day, based on her conversations with some of her friends. I should note that I've also spent nearly my whole life in cities listed on your first link as being one with the highest ratio of single women to single men.
> This is absolutely false.
Using your own data, New York City is #4 on the list for the highest ratio of single women to single men, and from the tumblr link you can see that Manhattan skews more heavily towards single women then New York City as a whole.
That article sounds like it supports a corrollary of rayiner's theory, that men are sick of having to "earn it". The article certainly seems to support that it is indeed women who control sex, and anytime they "settle for less" they feel like they're "giving it up".
Little do they know that even in marriage the dynamics don't change much, only the number of people involved (married people stereotype joke :-))
Adults with free choice should be able to buy and sell sex. There's no intrinsic problem with that.
The trickiness comes from what is meant by "free choice". Is a drug addict free to make a choice about sex work? How about someone with huge debts?
And existing laws should be aimed at protecting the more vulnerable people (children; trafficked workers; etc) but have unintended consequences of pushing away from working from a well run brothel and towards working off the street or a poorly run brothel.
If adults with free choice are able to buy and sell sex, then economics and the dynamics of capitalism are going to compel disadvantaged people into selling sex, far more than happens today. I'm not going to argue that the vice laws we have today are coherently enforceable or practicable, but there is more to the issue of outlawing prostitution than Puritan moralism.
If we expand our aversion to people being coerced into sex to an aversion to people being coerced into harmful work of any kind, we quickly find some pretty serious problems with modern society all over the place. The concept of the standard "Small Town, America" coal miner starts to appear pretty damn questionable. Forget vice and potential psychological damage; they are literally trading years off their life to pull themselves out of abject poverty. Maybe mining should be a vice.
Clandestine mining would likely not be a serious concern if we were to ban mining, but on the other hand mining is far more essential that luxury service industries.
Edit: I think I should clarify this. I do think that reviewing the role of economic coercion in all industries is a worthwhile endeavor, I'm not trying to throw that out there like some sort of absurd slippery slope. However I don't think this discussion will ever happen without an extra push, a push like puritanical values provides in limited cases.
Smoking bans in bars might be a good example. I think that most people agree that it is a decide thing to do, to improve the quality of life of bar workers if for no other reason, but these are basically air-quality laws that are more stringent than our normal air-quality laws. I think the reason why bar workers get the benefit of these laws, but factory workers need to rely on less stringent OSHA air quality regulations, is because in the case of bars the air quality issue is the result of something that has gotten a pretty effective moral outrage campaign.
The fact that other industries manage to (both literally and figuratively) throw their own workers under the bus, should give extra pause in legalizing work that have strong associations to abuse, degradation and harm.
While this is technically true, I disagree with the undertone. I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers.
Severe? Hardly. It's not like these people are being beaten or abused. They're there voluntarily. They're just getting the short-end of the economic stick and their clients got the short-end of the sexual capital[0] stick.
It's only emotional harm if you attach a lot of emotional value in the work you do. It's not really any different than whoring yourself out to Wall Street. If you have ethical concerns with the work, it will cause you anguish. If you don't and you're happy with the money you won't be bothered or emotionally harmed that much.
As the author of this piece pointed out, it's all incredibly pedestrian. The emotional harm really is the emotional pain of having no better options to make a living than participating in an exploitative system they don't fully agree with.
If the government has the power to stop a particular exploitation, and decides not to stop it, hoping that some decades or centuries down the line all citizens will be enlightened enough to cease this exploitation themselves, is that morally more correct?
Many sex workers are not in a position to leave "job paying below the market rate", for a combination of reasons like illegal immigration, underage, drug addictions, and psychological and corporal torture and abuse.
In most definitions of human rights there is a provision that these rights are "unalienable", making it at least highly questionable to "buy" the right to violate someones sexual self-determination, or inflict the long term damage that has been shown to occur even in "voluntary" prostitutes.
For the majority of the poor (and everyone else) who want to work and move up in life, don't put up any barriers to action and economic activity.
For the tiny minority who don't want to work and move up in life (usually, because they don't really care that much), who cares? Don't sacrifice the virtuous and capable majority for their sake.
You may say, "What about a country like India or (less extreme Eastern Europe), where the poor genuinely can't move up?" Well, the only way to change that is to free up the economy and let people pursue sustainable economic action. If you put up barriers to economic activity, the people who want to move up will never be able to; they will be permanently poor.
For example, ith an expanding economy, you can eventually make it so a person making $10/hour is able to live nicely, as productivity rises and prices fall.
But if you instead put minimum wage at $20/hour, people who only actually produce $10/hour of value won't have jobs, and the economy won't be able to expand to the point where if they had a $10/hour job, they could live decently on it.
Minimum wage and other regulations are why America no longer manufactures. We could be making all the things now made in China, with a commensurate decrease in expenses. Our factory workers wouldn't be rich, but they'd be able to afford the kinds of things they themselves make in the factories. Meanwhile, China would also be doing fine, it just would have grown at a more measured and sustainable pace, which isn't a bad thing.
No, it does not look like you see what I was saying. I said explicitly that exploited sex workers don't really have freedom of choice. Their "captivity" isn't even economic. In some cases it is outright physical captivity, sometimes it is legal captivity (illegal immigrants), psychological captivity or even addiction.
Don't assume that a prostitute can just walk away from her pimp, because you think you would be able to do so in her place.
I'm not talking about higher-priced or even "self-employed" prostitutes, I'm talking about the "mass market". These women don't earn more than minimum wage. Sometimes less, all things considered. In lots of cases they would even get more social benefits than the pimps pay them... In some reported cases the pimps take even the social benefits from their "employees".
First case: I am totally against slavery and any kind of coersion. That is what we have a government for.
Second case: Psychological problems. We can't actually solve for those people by forbidding prostitution (or whatever the cause du jour is).
If wages are still so low that people literally can't survive, guess what? You have a glut on the labor market, probably because of decades of government policy that encouraged people to have more children than the society can economically sustain. Don't blame that on capitalism. You have to either take the medicine (reduce social benefits) or be permanently sick.
We can't solve the "psychological problems" of prostitutes, so that makes both pimping and using prostitutes morally ok? Why not make using prostitutes illegal? Seems to work like a charm in Sweden.
In Germany we have legalized prostitution. Turns out, that pimps and illegal prostitution benefited a lot more than "regular" prostitutes, however you define that. For that matter all of these girls would be able to earn more money and live a better life (even illegal immigrants in some cases) if they would just go to the authorities and claim unemployment benefits.
How do you explain that they "prefer" sex work over easier jobs with more money or no job with more money. Easiest explanation: It's not so much about the prostitutes' "preferences".
In many countries around the world, especially the more developed ones there just is no economic need for women to go into low-rate prostitution. More expensive "engagements", maybe, but that's more of an exception than the rule. Even begging is preferable to being kept in a brothel and get raped multiple times a day (no, they don't have "fun", and without "fun" it will feel and hurt like rape).
I think it is almost guaranteed if you know the steps to take.
Step 1: Go to college, which you can do very nearly for free these days, and major in something useful, like (say) computer science.
Step 2: Get a job using that useful degree.
My grandpa took 8 years go to to college, by taking every other year off to work. There isn't much excuse for people these days except not having the knowledge of the above two steps.
If you fucked around in high school, that is also a barrier to going to college. But you can go to community college (they let everybody in) and then transfer after 2 years. It's a common occurence.
You can also simply become a tradesman at community college: Plumber, welder, electrician, heating/AC repairman, etc. From what I can tell, there is no glut of people in these professions, people just don't want them. 51% of Americans are now on government welfare, and that's a lot easier than working hard.
I think it's possible it might've happened although I don't know a specific case. I have read about several instances of gamers having died as a result of prolonged sitting and developing deep vein thrombosis though. Here is an example: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/xbox-addict-chris-stan...
I'm certainly not inclined to dump all of the plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion and suffering involved in sex labor.
From what is available in the media and public discussion you can deduce that commercially viable prostitution without exploitation is a very "niche" product.
I also wasn't speaking only about webcam studios, but even with these studios there is a lot that is going on "off screen". Forcing a model to perform sexual acts is still rape, even if the perpetrator is not on screen and even when he has "trained" the model to make a good show.
Oh, you've deduced it from the media and public discussion. We're good then.
On behalf of the ignorant masses, forever shrouded in blindness by our inferior power of deduction and lack of access to such hallowed sources as the media and public discussion, I would like to thank you for educating us on the true state of the world.
> I'm certainly not inclined to dump all of the plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion and suffering involved in sex labor.
There's plentiful evidence of exploitation, coercion, and suffering involved in labor in many industries . In other industries, we deal with this by attacking specific exploitative, coercive, and suffering-inducing practices directly -- and by doing so, we've (in the developed world) managed to greatly mitigate the exploitation, coercion, and suffering in all kinds of industries.
In the sex industry, we've mostly taken the approach of viewing the problems inherent in having a sex industry, and used it as an excuse to preserve and reinforce the illegality and taboos against sex work, and as a result we've managed to perpetuate (and in some cases exacerbate) the exploitation, coercion and suffering in that industry
> I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers.
The "most extreme realizations" of most industries have been shown to cause severe harm -- often both physical and emotional -- to exploited workers.
I mean, really, we see this fairly regularly with the all kinds industries that don't involve sex, and then we blame it on the particular abusive practices, and don't try to claim its fundamental to having an industy that deals in, say, garments, or electronics.
Are we talking about startups or sex industry? Cause burnout/long working hours have taken a toll in many of our brightest engineers and ruined a few families as well. And hey, if you are not doing 80 hours work you are a cop-out right?
You say this as if the sex industry is a single organization which does both the cam shows of legal adults and exploitation of children.
Would you say that the internet industry is inherently harmful because much of this exploitation of children takes place over the internet? Would you say that the software industry is inherently harmful because some people write malware?
You said that "I think the industry is fundamentally different and in its most extreme realizations has been shown to cause severe emotional harm to exploited workers" but I'm not sure how the most extreme realizations of abuse in a particular industry speak to the industry as a whole, unless those are somehow condoned by the majority of the industry or vastly more widespread in a particular industry.
There's a lot of the adult entertainment industry that works scrupulously within the law, and provides income for a lot of models. For some reason, a lot of people have a notion that they are being harmed merely because they are involved in sex work, no matter that they are consenting adults and are choosing this work over any of a number of other jobs that they could have.
So do you believe that working in the sex industry is inherently harmful in some way? Or do you believe that the industry exploits its workers more than is common in other industries? Or that acceptance of harmful behavior is more widespread in the sex industry? And do you have evidence to back this up?
And note, of course, that I'm talking about the legal sex industry; like in the case of any prohibition, such as alcohol prohibition back in the day or drug prohibition today, illegal industries tend to attract more crime, because you're already a criminal merely by participating in the industry. Do you have evidence that shows that the legal sex industry is particularly harmful or more conducive towards tempting people to abusive or illegal behaviors than any other similar industry?
The way I see it, is that sex work has a higher chance of involving harm, but it's not a guarantee. It's inherently risky (contact sex work, I mean) due to STI's and various other reasons; and often those who participate in it as a worker do so for reasons that we should be tackling (be it abuse while young, a lack of other career options, &c) as a society. If the people involved are not suffering or being exploited, then more power to them! In my research though, often those at most risk of harm in society end up there, and that's a bad thing, in my opinion.
I live in a country where prostitution is completely legal, and while that doesn't entirely remove all problems, it's certainly helped. Being in a western first world country also helps. it's not a simple topic, and your point is well made; we should think before we rush to judgements and conclusions, especially those based on "Puritan" morals and societies shunning of the industry as a whole.
I don't think of it as a single organization, or as an industry that is inherently harmful. There are many adult entertainers who enjoy their work. I do however think that it's something to watch carefully in developing countries in the same way that we consider safe working conditions.
I think that perhaps the quantity of exploited workers in the sex industry is not higher, but the depth of exploitation possible can be much greater than that in many other industries.
Some people like sex, and they like getting paid for sex work.
That's not true for most people involved in sex work. It's not a free choice they've made. They find themselves in that situation to pay for drugs, or alcohol, or to pay off debts, or because they're modern slaves.
Camming is the lighter end of sex work, and thus the ratio of willing : unwilling workers is better than for other sex work, but it's still more likely to be harmful than harm free.
> Some people like sex, and they like getting paid for sex work.
> That's not true for most people involved in sex work.
You know, if you dropped "sex" for most other domains wherein people might work, that'd probably still be true. There's probably a few areas of work where most people work in the domain because they like it, but for most domains of work people work in the domain because they need the money and working in the domain is the best way they feel they have of making the money they need.
Socially taboo -- and, even moreso, illegal -- domains of work, naturally, increase the risk of people being stuck in them and being less able to move to other domains of work later, and they also increase the risk of exploitation (because people feel trapped in them, because subject to abuse have less ability to address abuse, and because the social taboo (or illegality) of working in the domain naturally means that people, even if they like the domain, are less likely to choose it as a domain of work if they have other viable options, meaning the people that do end up there are usually the most vulnerable to exploitation in the first place.
Not liking your job != exploitation. There are plenty of people out there working shit jobs to pay off debts or a support a family, even though if they have a choice they'd be drinking daiquiris on Aruba, but that does not make them "modern slaves".
You can make just as much of an inequality in the other direction. There's a difference between chatting with someone you don't know in a skimpy outfit and doing repetitive manual labor in the heat and sun for 12 hours a day.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
No, not hard at all.
I had a friend from high school who met a guy at a party. He gave her drugs. Before long, she was addicted. She couldn't afford the habit. He let her get into full withdrawal, then offered her drugs if she'd have sex with his friends. She did. A week later, she had dropped out of law school and was working a street corner.
My understanding is that this is a fairly common path into prostitution.
> Outside of human trafficking (which I acknowledge as an important problem) it's pretty hard to get coerced into prostitution.
While I agree with what you seem to be arguing in your post, this particular sentence is true in the same sense as "outside of triangles, its pretty hard to have a three-sided polygon."
4.5 million victims of trafficking for purposes of sex, 40 million prostitutes total.
I certainly won't argue with the idea that some of them are forced into it by circumstance, but no matter how you slice it you end up with a lot of voluntary sex workers.
Your post started by excluding trafficked workers!
You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
Your link in incoherent. One example:
> It is true that as I type this, there are young girls and women {and some boys} who are physically locked behind closed doors, who are threatened with their family’s safety, and who are paying off debts by servicing men in brothels. Estimates are, in fact, that there are about 4.5 million women and children forced, by coercion or abuse, into the sex industry today.
That's coercion, not trafficking. I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution. (Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?)
>Your post started by excluding trafficked workers!
Yes, to focus on people with choices, because it's obvious that trafficked workers are bad in any type of work.
>You can't come back comparing trafficked workers to non-trafficked workers and say that the rest are voluntary.
I can and do claim that a large amount of non-trafficked workers are voluntary. Sure, not 100%, but I never argued 100%.
>There are criminal gangs that specialise in coercing girls into providing sexual services, and who take money from punters for those services. See recent UK cases about child grooming gangs.
That's certainly a bad thing, but it's unrelated to a discussion of typical work, which involves consent-capable adults.
>That's coercion, not trafficking.
Well great, if that's accurate then it makes my point even better: <4.5M trafficked, <4.5M coerced, 35M voluntary.
> I have no idea what definition they're using for coercion, or trafficking, or even prostitution.
Well I didn't link the blog for its own text, but for having the sources in a convenient form. It cites 21 million trafficked, your link says 30 million slaves, either number works fine.
>Can a 14 year old be a prostitute, or is that always rape of a child?
I would say that it can be both, but the answer doesn't matter when you're comparing 5 million to 40 million.
>Here's a better article
These articles are informative but I'm afraid I don't see the connection to my argument, which is that there are a large number of non-slave non-coerced sex workers, whether they particularly like their job or not.
Or is it the other way around... the harmed (abused, psychologically dysfunctional) who find themselves unable to operate within normal societal bounds, start to "get creative" about their work options?
No wonder, then, that such folks find themselves hurt by the work or perhaps drawn deeper into the vortex to earn a better income; they were already unable to pursue more typical paths.
For varying definitions of "voluntary." I find it difficult to believe that the majority of these workers would choose of their own volition to work in this industry if they had the option of equally well paying source of income. Just because something is economic coercion doesn't mean it's not coercion. Just like "consenting" sexual relationships with prepubescent minors aren't actually consenting, since the minor hasn't developed the capacity of sexual consent, neither is the "voluntary" working of sex workers voluntary when it is one of the limited means of getting a living wage.
It's not even similar to the sexual exploitation of prepubescent minors -- people have problems with minors working in sweatshops, after all.
The rest of your argument applies to just about well-paying job in a poor country. I know software developers making an order of magnitude more than they would at any other job. Some of them don't enjoy dealing with software. It's still a voluntary decision.
If I say I would not want to work in telecom because I get paid more for my efforts in that field than others, is that somehow now involuntary?
It's possible to acknowledge that many sex workers have challenging situations without denying them agency entirely. If they aren't "prepubescent minors", then they aren't "just like" such minors.
In pointing this out, I'm not just playing a philosophical game. Those who wish to assist sex workers, whether in leaving sex work entirely or just being safer or happier in sex work, ought to be practical enough to realize that many sex workers choose sex work over other means of support.
Your point of view couldn't be more incorrect. Coworking spaces aren't modeled around a brothel atmosphere as most cam dens are. There are "humane" cam studios in some countries like Germany where there are regulations for sex workers, but this is usually the exception.
...and this spaces are full of people that are doing their job by passion and not because they don't have the choice, right? This is sad to read such a comment.
Yes. I know about the ones in Arizona and Nevada because I know (offline) two friends that work in them; one with a boyfriend, one with a husband, both go to college and "cam" in the studio after classes a few nights a week for extra money. The boyfriend is in his girlfriend's page most of those nights so they can chat whenever it's not busy. They're both also active in their local kink community; they have a passion for voyeurism and get paid for it.
Yes, there are "sex workers" that are being exploited or coerced into their situation all over the world. Not everyone who turns on their webcam and disrobes for money is one of those people, and the fact that there are companies catering to them isn't in itself a "sad" thing. They're not part of some underground -- you can find the job listings for the studio's building managers, website maintenance and such on Monster.com. If you've ever visited Philadelphia and walked the tourist attractions, you unknowingly walked by the nation's largest phone sex hotline too. It's a cubicle-farm call center, the employees wearing normal work attire while working FT shifts for FT pay, benefits and bonuses.
I mostly agree, but nothing is pure and perfect. I've seen many people in dev out of necessity rather than appreciation or even desire/passion. Many people despise it deeply (managerial harassment, being undervalued as a person, high stress, absurd workplace processes). It's better for social status and pay.
Several years ago I worked at an adult entertainment company. They were involved in pretty much every vertical of adult content except perhaps print. When I read articles like this one I'm always amazed at how well the tone of numbness carries through. This is the essential characteristic of the adult industry, as everyone involved in it, top to bottom, is numb or becomes numb.
It's a numbness to being objectified, passed around and drained of value. It's not only the "talent" (as the performers are called) that is treated in that manner. All employees are subject to it - from HR, secretaries, video editors, developers, IT, marketing associates, all the way up to executives.
In adult entertainment you are not an individual, but rather a resource to be exploited. I've worked in a few other industries and I've never felt the callousness that I did while working in the adult industry. Because everyone is numb, it ends up creating an environment where there is no support and you'll eagerly step over a fallen comrade and right into the meat grinder yourself.
I remember sitting at a pub with a group of 8 coworkers, one of whom had just given his two-weeks notice. He confided in us, over beers, that he was extremely depressed. No one at the table said anything in response; no reassurances, no thoughtful gestures. We sat quietly for a few moments before someone changed the conversation, but we all knew why he felt that way.
I don't think that's unique to adult industry though...
I know plenty of people in programming business who are depressed. Read some stories about gaming company death marches.
Financial business is also notorious for numbness and meaninglessness it often engenders in its participants.
Let's not fail to mention the innumerable hundreds of thousands who are stuck in menial/warehouse/retail/tech support jobs that offer little to no mental nourishment. "Wage slave" is a common term for a reason.
I think pretty much any industry can numb and dehumanize people who are not careful to build and maintain their relationships and social structures. I would not expect to be best friends with all my coworkers, and I would feel my life to be severely one-sided if I only had friends among coworkers.
I didn't say unique to, but "essential to." It may also be essential to those other industries, but I have no experience in them.
Sure, shady and disheartening things can happen at any company. However, if that type of negative culture is cultivated at the expense of everything else, it can be jarring even for the most stable individual. I experienced some things that were pretty terrible (and illegal) that gave me pause, but more veteran employees shrugged those things off with cavalier sarcasm. I left because I didn't want to become like them.
The people getting rich off of this industry are the cam sites, such as MyFreeCams or LiveJasmin, typically taking half of the earnings brought in (models get the other half, often split down to a quarter if a studio is involved). Several of them are generating tens of millions in revenue at this point, and are among the top 500 sites globally in traffic.
The founder of MyFreeCams runs a VC business in the US with his cam wealth.
I wouldn't be surprised if in another five years the cam business is larger than the traditional porn industry, including the large porn sites.
It's probably already bigger, but they guard their numbers. Tube sites are just portals to get you to go to a cam site or a dating site. There are fewer regulations with those sites as opposed to professionally produced pornography (2257 regs, condom use laws in LA County, etc.). You also don't have to worry about copyright infringement (executing it or defending yourself from it) with cams and dating sites.
How do they monetize the adult dating sites? Sign up fees? I would think there's not a lot of repeat business there, once the users find out it's a scam. Whereas cam sites can milk people forever.
Membership fees and cross-promotions to other adult properties are the primary means of monetization. Some of them will have virtual goods and tribute/tip systems as well. Most often (male) users cannot communicate with other members unless they pay for access. And, what's more scammy, is that if you receive any messages from women, it's highly likely to be a camgirl or female agent from another part of the company. These girls receive commissions for getting non-paying members to convert.
Hookup sites are a volume-based business. A common business practice is to whitelabel a successful hookup site; give it a different skin, but share the same database so it looks populated. Once you're in the database, you'll be spammed for any new whitelabeled version that pops up. Also, the user population is 95% male, so you have better odds of finding a female hookup at a gay bar.
Yea, the owner of LiveJasmin is currently the third wealthiest man of his country (Hungary). Sure it's not a big country but he's worth around half a billion dollars. Interview with him with English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqKHAgzoiQY
Anyone selling shovels during the gold rush? That is products or services to the models themselves, like schedule optimisation, gadgets, macro responses, leaderboards, third-party sites with monetisation of secondary products and memorabilia, lighting and furnishings for the rooms, etc?
There's a new class of site that's essentially a hosting platform--anyone can use the site to host a show out of their own home, use the streaming infrastructure, billing, tips system, private shows, pay-per-access pics/vids, etc.
Provided you can manage to stay anonymous, seems like a safe way to be a sex worker without violence/coercion.
Many people would pay for non-sexual fully clothed friendship services.
Get the price right, get the training right, make sure there is strong blocking to protect against creeps (and set expectations from the start) and I think you'd get considerable business.
I wonder if there are any rigorous studies on the side-effects of Japan's host industry (which is exactly what you described). Business seems to be pretty good judging by the number of clubs you come across in Kabukicho alone...
Business is indeed extremely good but those hostesses themselves are in debt or adore lonely and resort to going to host clubs (the male equivalent) where they get entertained.
Vicious cycle. Exists in Korea too from what friends there have told me. In the early evening you see salons packed with young hostess women getting ready and getting their hair done, and a few hours later the same salons are packed with young men hosts who are getting ready to entertain the hostesses when they get off their shift.
It is hard to sell that and divorce it from the sexual nature or the insinuation that it has sex in it.
"What does your start-up do?" "We are an escort service, we provide companionship". "Oh so hookers?". "No, no, just talking" "Riiiiight...sure...."
Kind of like. One would have to go to great length to really convince or explain to the others (investors, friends, anyone) that this business does not sex as the underlying service.
> “There’s no way that (sexual assault) will not happen,” assistant city attorney Jennifer Zilavy said. “No offense to men, but I don’t know any man who wants to just snuggle.”
It would need games and activities as well as profiles.
How would it differ from facebook? Not that I approve of what facebook has become but I can imagine spending a lot of time developing this awesome site only to have it be nothing more than a social media clone.
Is it common for people to "meet" new friends on facebook? I have no experience of people doing so. If someone I had never met contacted me on facebook to try and forge a social relationship, I would find it inappropriate.
Unless you opted in to an app to find new people. Seems like instead of building a site from the ground, the quicker technical approach is probably a Facebook app.
People in general have an aversion to linking their personal FaceBook to apps in this space. Rightly or wrongly, they worry about it becoming known that they use services like that. It's an interesting phenomenon, and it wasn't all like that back a few years.
Haven't people been living in fear of their loneliness being unmasked for longer than a few years? Put another way, don't we already demonize loneliness and low social value?
I can't imagine it being a new phenomenon that people are averse to "Katie started using e-Friend MatchMaker!" showing up on their Facebook news feed. And if there is a usage statistic indicating that fewer people are using e-Friend MatchMaker, I wager it's because they're realizing that it shows up on their news feed.
I would think it's always been uncool to use dating websites and any other extension of that concept. Even on Tinder, there's like this subtle charade that yeah, we're both normally way too cool for this stuff but our throng of friends finally convinced us to join. Maybe we can find some time to send each other a message despite our busy schedule of meeting new people irl.
The relationship is different, thus so long as the clients are obeying the rules they are guaranteed someone who will pretend to like them and who will engage them in conversation.
Social networks sort of work for people who have friends. People willing to pay for fake friendship probably do not have many friends. It's alarming to see numbers for people who haven't spoken to anyone for the past week, for example.
I actually don't find this story all too surprising. What really irked me was the piece on how Japan commodified various aspects of a relationship (i.e. "cuddle cafes"[0], those bar/club places where people pay top dollar to tell their problems to complete strangers). Maybe this is the logical "next step" of human relationships; however, such a conclusion is thoroughly disheartening.
> Maybe this is the logical "next step" of human relationships
It might be a logical one, but it's not one we ought to aim for. There's a weak, but building movement going on trying to push us in a different direction. See stuff like Jeremy Rifkin's RSA talk or Enrique Peñalosa's TED talk. I'm sorry about the vagueness, but I'm having trouble coming up with a way to summarize it usefully. =/
It might be a logical one, but it's not one we ought to aim for
I'm also not convinced, for reasons related to Coase's "The Nature of the Firm" that I describe in more detail here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/an-economic-model-o... . The short version is that people reap efficiency gains from not having to negotiate every interaction, which probably points to ongoing couple / small group formation.
I think fundamentally, people are growing more lonely as we shift from the purely physical realm into the abstract world of the web. You have startups like Grouper trying to solve loneliness, but in reality they may even be exacerbating it. We all get a little lonely sometimes, and I don't think there's a viable substitute to physically meeting someone. Barring a fundamental change in our brain chemistry.
Which is why I reference movements like the one Peñalosa is part of. (I don't have enough easy references.) It isn't something that can be well-answered by startups. Profit motive defines the shift from the purely physical realm into the abstract world. That's what money is: it abstracts trust and makes it less necessary. It makes us more efficient for the price of less effort spent on trust.
The answer isn't to remove money but rather to provide money-less connection points. Create debts that aren't monetary but personal and non-transferable. Talk to people for no better reason than to get to know them. Find out what makes them tick and what would make them happy. That kind of thing. It's... complex.
Whilst there are a lot of impassioned statements of position in this thread, I'm not seeing a lot of discussion of the massive body of research on sex work and sex workers, or the many commentaries on the industry from people working inside it.
Given this is HN, that seems like a bit of a pity. As usual, evidence produces some conclusions which intuition may not.
Here's one study on strippers, for example, from the University of Leeds (Reuters link, can't find the original study, irritatingly):
Well written article. I spend regularly on the cam sites and find the whole model fascinating. Very few models however actually give any meta details such as those provided in this article.
I'm in Bulgaria, not Romania. We have similarly great residential Internet speeds and I think the article is wrong in attributing them to the sex industry. (I have no idea whether there are a significant number of similar businesses here in Sofia.)
I think the net connection speeds are due to a combination of two factors: a very dense population (think 10-20 floor cheap residential towers from the times of socialism) a wildly unregulated market. The result was a zillion of small, very aggressive ISPs wiring up neighbourhoods with LAN cables for 5-10 EUR/month "all our router can handle" speeds (only international traffic is metered, national - where the torrent trackers and other torrent users are - is virtually at wire speed).
As a Romanian web developer working remotely for a Western company active in the adult industry and collaborating with video-chat studios in my hometown (Bucharest), I'd like to add my 2 cents:
I'm actually in touch with the studio managers here and I can tell you everything happens 'by the book', we are not a 3rd world country. The girls are not enslaved, abused or forced into anything, instead they are recruited through the usual recruiting methods (media), they even work legally and get their pay-checks in time. They can quit whenever they want, all of this happening in complete discretion. You probably know that the websites they work on are blocked within the same country for obvious reasons.
Of course the morality of the girls may come into question, but that is strictly up to them. They are just taking advantage of the economical discrepancy between eastern and western Europe (average monthly wage here is around 400 EUR).
Yes, there are people spending massive amounts of money on video-chat and things can degenerate quickly (affecting your private life) but same thing happens with gambling sites and no one bats an eye.
As for working within such a company I could never say that I became numb or feeling morally wrong. I've had the opportunity to work with quality people on challenging technical issues and it has been a prolific period for my career. The way I see it is as being strictly business.
As for Romania, it really is a good place for startups.
There are a lot of competent people here wasting their value and time on jobs and wages that some of you would consider ridiculous. But that's just what history left us with and it may take a while for us to get in line.
"Unofficially, someone's put a lot of work into the country’s telecommunication infrastructure, with the result that Romania now has a faster download speed than any G20 nation."
So, low cost of living and great internet infrastructure. Seems like a good place to found a "regular" startup also.
Anyone knows how hard would be to get a visa? Are they part of EU?
She says the girls are exploited by the studio and the clients are exploited by the girls. A typical marxist way to view things. I see no one being exploited here. All I see is consenting adults passing contracts with each others and all getting satisfaction out of it. Nobody is being forced to do anything. The studio makes good money, the women and men work willingly and make a great wage even by american standards. And clients, well, they may be lonely indeed but for all I know, the few minutes they spend on the cam may be the the happiest minutes of their days, no one is forcing them to pay for the service and they seem extremely satisfied by what they're paying for.
So who here is being exploited? All I see is an exchange of transactions between consenting adults that all seem extremely satisfied with what they get out of each deal. What again is wrong with that? Where is the exploitation? I know it sounds good to say these people are all exploited and maybe we should ban these activities to protect these people from hurting themselves because they're too dumb to make their own decisions. This is generating great business for Romania and client satisfactions. Please, don't call it exploitation and let people live their life. Live and let live. Don't judge, don't prohibit things because they offend you.
They are just satisfying the clients needs for their service, the clients know exactly what they're doing. She even told one guy she had a boyfriend and everything and the guy didn't care, he just enjoyed paying for his fantasy.
Wasen't this why the Internet and Cams were invented? I'm being facetious(a word my father abused), but kinda serious.
I remember talking to Rick about a way to annonymously
talk to chicks in the early ninties. It has gotten disgusting though, and I'm sorry, I don't blame guys completely; girls have changed. They care more about money
than ever before. Girls in the eighties and ninties didn't
know what power they possessed, and I think they had better
morals? As to any masoginistic claims; I used "girl", because
you in my time women didn't spread their legs for clicks.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania#Average_Spe...