I can make an informed guess about the connection between welfare reform/sex industry pay.
The sex industry has to be seen as a really diverse grouping, which you know. For prostitutes there are thedifferent levels of call girls, then there are street prostitutes, which are themselves different levels, depending on age, location, attractiveness, availability, and drug use. Low end prostitutes have gotten cheaper as drug use increased. I'm not sure about average street prostitutes, nothing changes in the high end because healthy, drop-dead gorgeous, charming prostitutes are not that common, and never will be (I'm basing this on the relative scarcity of such people in the general population). I think the middle group is the only one that will be affected.
Ditto strip clubs. There are A, B, and C clubs. A clubs are full of pretty beautiful women with enhanced breasts, tans, and perfect bodies. Businessmen clients. Nothing is going to change there. The women (men?) who work in the B and C clubs, in my guess, are the ones who are going to be affected, more than the prostitutes in the correlating group. But there are alot of average-y attractive women out there who could make it in a B or C club. Prostitution is not going to siphon off alot of those women because it's so much more socially unacceptable than dancing.
The women in the A clubs and high end escorts are elites, the drug-addicted prostitutes are already so cheap I can't imagine their proces going down all that much. ($10-15 dollars on the street where I live). The women in the middle are in trouble.
Incidentally, the women at a nude club in San Francisco unionized last year but I can't imagine that is going to be a widespread phenon.
Yours, Frances
On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >However, with the 'Welfare Reform,' won't the wages of sex industry workers
> >get depressed, I wonder? (Does Doug have stats on this?)
>
> I don't think there's an SIC code for sex work. But this is an interesting
> question, and I'll ask around.
>
> Doug
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