Of course, it’s not just code wizards and marketing geniuses who are out of a job. San Francisco has long been home to an extremely diverse and loosely regulated sex industry, which just exploded under the dot-com spell. Think about the typical dot-commer: young, male, over-worked, over-paid, eyes permanently blurred from 14-hour days in front of a computer screen...in many ways, he’s a sex worker’s ideal client. He’s got money and he’s got very little time to spend it - he needs the most bang for his buck, so to speak. He needs to schedule titillation. And when you think about it, the two industries have a lot in common. For one thing, when you work at a computer all day, most of your interaction is virtual - using a machine as an intermediary breeds an intimacy based on projection. The intimacy between a sex worker and her client is equally skewed - in a sense, the same kind of suspension of disbelief needs to take place.
Like in much of the tech industry, internet companies were heavily male dominated. I met many women in San Francisco who were raking in dot-com dollars - they were just doing it from a bedroom or a stage. I knew call girls who were pulling $500 an hour, or $5000 a weekend, who could pick and choose their clients from the hundreds of inquiries brought in from the web. Some started offering what they called GFE - the “Girlfriend Experience”. This was for guys who wanted sex, but who also wanted companionship, who had the money but not the time to meet a girl, date and have a relationship. If a girl offered the GFE, she would often just have regular appointments with the same five or six guys every week. In between appointments, she might keep up a website with a journal, some pictures, maybe a wishlist - and any guy could participate for $29.99/month. I met an art student who stripped 4 nights a week and made more than enough to buy a loft, making her the only artist I knew who could actually afford a live/work space. I even met an escort who had been swept off her feet by a client who was worth 10 million on paper. They got married and she quit the business after 8 years.
And then a funny thing started to happen. I heard about it from all my friends who had been in the industry for a while, a grumble here, a grumble there: it was clear that with the fall of the economy, business was slow. But it seemed like there were A LOT more girls working,especially at the strip clubs. The local pleasure sector had become more and more crowded with workers, all fighting over fewer dollars from fewer clients.
I met a girl called Alissa who had been making $100,000 a year as a mid-level manager at a tech company, until she was laid off in 2001. She had been hired right out of school, and at 24, she was considered “over qualified” for almost every job she applied for. Dead broke, she began posing for online porn several times a month. Then she started doing videos, solo or with her boyfriend. One day she told me she was considering an offer of $1500 to do an intercourse scene with a stranger. Alissa told me that she had never considered any kind of porn or sex work, but she found herself, she said, in a position where her “body was more economically viable than her brain”. She said, “I’m having sex anyway. I might as well get paid for it.” She told me that a lot of her friends were doing porn, and others had started stripping. She said one of her friends was getting her an audition at a club - She thought stripping would probably be easy money for easy work. After all, she was a “sexy” girl...
I thought about girls I knew who had been in the industry for awhile. I knew from them that it was never “easy”, even when the money was good. Not only is it physically and psychologically strenuous, but ultimately, sex work is customer service. In a lot of ways, being “sexy” doesn’t have a whole lot to do with it.
I talked to one of the leading dominatrixes in town, who had started as a stripper ten years before. I told her about Alissa and she rolled her eyes. We talked about the forces that were bringing girls like Alissa into the industry - the combination of, on one hand, the international stripper chic perpetuated by forces as disparate as Howard Stern and Christina Aguilera, and on the other hand, good old fashioned hard times. And she told me that she was confident that this too would pass - just like the boom that crashed and brought on the panic, this phase of too many girls/not enough boys would be over soon. Like in any industry, the workers who hold on when times are bad, who continue to do their job and make sure their customers are satisfied, are gonna be first in line to reap the rewards when times are good. And after all, it’s gotta take more than a couple of bankrupt geeks and some sally come-latelys to break the world’s oldest profession. It’s certainly been through worse.
Just like everyone else, San Francisco’s sex workers knew the end had to come eventually, but most still weren’t ready. A call girl I knew had listened to a client’s investment advice - “you can’t keep $50,000 in a shoe box”, he said - and she lost it all. The escort that married the client? She had to go back to work when her husband’s millions disappeared over night. My art student friend had to sell her loft and move back in with her mom. She actually quit stripping because it got so bad that she could make more money teaching. She would joke that her last few nights at work, there were tumbleweeds bouncing across the stage.