Hello all,
Great posts by Anon (#13), Doc (#17), Patron (#27). I'm not sure if there is much difference in the backgrounds between women who have never considered being escorts and never would or those who came into the sex industry. After so many years of life and being around people I know that it would be very rare for anyone not to have faced some serious personal crisis, abuses, or tragedy in their lives. Maybe the only difference was the choice to be an escort.
The question of this thread is how many girls in the industry are mistreated? In any business situation there's a risk of exploitation, bias, coercion, double-dealing, backstabbing, personal agendas, emotional blackmail, some sort of abuse in one form or another. In that way there probably isn't a lot of basic difference. You're going to work with or be around people who are those you would otherwise avoid and some that have poor ethics or no scruples at all. Still, the very thing that attracts the ladies to the industry, whether it's a stable logical choice or a more desperate one, creates the possible motivations for mistreatment. That's the large flow of cash, unknown, undeclared, untaxed. While you may have to associate and deal with questionable people in any business, I can't help believing that in a yet quasi-legal business with such an unaccounted large cash flow where a person is the object directly exchanged for profits there is a greater impulse to control that commodity by one means one another.
The fault lies with the status of the industry, the need for secrecy and the issues surrounding the ability to have due recourse against mistreatment. That environment itself is more fertile ground for the possibility of mistreatment because of it's current legal/illegal situation. Where the hourly value of a person directly translates into profits there is going to be greater risk of mistreatment, either because of the need to control profits or because the lack of oversight provides the opportunity for financial and sexual exploitation. Then over the years we have had many reports of intentional drug dispersion and coercion or threats against the ladies posted on this board, and for many of us there has been face to face testimony from the ladies of shady manipulations. Of course there's the high chance that the ladies want to manipulate the sympathies of the clients for their own purposes. But having been close to some ladies for long periods of time I have no doubt many of the reports are very accurate.
A couple of days ago I was reading one person (don't remember who) talking about the psychological effect for him of being in the "hobby" and made some allusions to how it has changed his perspective towards women/escorts in a way that makes them seem...it's hard to put into words...less like individual persons, more like....hmmm...something you can have. I don't want to say "product" or "commodity". Then I remembered a conversation I had once with a very good friend in the hobby discussing whether we could send out ladies to see random men for sex. The answer was emphatically NO! I'm not saying there aren't generally decent people doing it, but what are the chances or temptations that doing so daily can develop into the view that these ladies are more like some thing instead of somebody, and what is the potential for excusing mistreatment due to the need to control profits in that situation...especially if a person begins to be perceived more as $$$ versus being a person and there's little oversight on the distributors as well as tenuous recourse for the ladies?
Good luck,
Merlot
