More from the Survey of Adult Service Providers

Recently I posted about an absolutely fascinating (to me anyway) national survey of nearly 700 internet-based sex workers, the SASP. It stayed on the front page of Coed for a surprisingly long time, indicating maybe that there is some interest in something about our little community other than the antics of the resident provocateurs. I’ve delved deeper into the papers posted on the authors’ websites and am back with more tidbits.

The average worker who worked the week before completing the survey saw 5.4 clients that week of whom 2.94 were repeats. Getting out the calculator, this implies 270 clients per fifty week year with 147 repeaters. There is no way to know how many different individuals this involves since the survey was a one week snap shot. The average reported weekly earnings for this group was $2,272 which would work at to 113,000 per year, all things being equal, which they usually are not. I should point out that this is a national survey and was largely taken before the boy geniuses of Wall Street blew up the world economy. The income levels then reported may not have survived the subsequent Great Recession.

Cunningham & Kendall quote an earlier study of Chicago streetwalkers that found a mean of 7.2 clients per week with 47.4% regulars. The eye-catching contrast between the earlier studies on streetwalkers and SASP internet providers is that the latter admit to 6.1% unprotected vaginal or anal sex while the SW survey found 79.4% unprotected penetration rising to 97% in some subsamples! Perhaps an explanation of why some of the fellows are out late driving in the blue light punctuated night despite the hours of fruitless search and the danger from that other “Blue Team”.

Perhaps not unrelated to the risky practices, “studies of streetwalking prostitutes generally find between 40%-80% work under pimp management” while 93% of “technology-facilitated sex worker(s)” are independents “who do not operate under third-party management”.

The average age of sex workers surveyed was 28.3 while the average age of customer guys was 43. The authors note that survey respondents are somewhat older than the average age of women on the TER data base from which they were invited to participate. Presumably client ages were estimated. The paper notes that women under 30 were more likely to report “risky behavior” which the authors consider to include seeing more clients and “group sex” as well as “unprotected” sex.

They consider the beloved BBBJ to be unprotected sex but but quote a 2001 study in this rather convoluted sentence: “ For a heterosexual woman who has receptive vaginal sex without a condom with a partner of unknown HIV serostatus and an HIV prevalence of 1%, the risk of HIV transmission in a single sex act would be ten times higher than is associated with receptive fellatio without out a condom”. Or, in other words, oral without a condom is much safer than intercourse without a condom, something teenagers obviously have grasped even if the news media has not.

Mean body mass index, apparently self reported, was 23.1 which works out to 142 lbs for 5’6”. Eleven percent reported a BMI below 18.5 which would be 115 lbs or less for the same height.

The study’s finding of an average of one client per day or less is an interesting contrast to the fevered speculations sometimes seen here locally although obviously the findings are an average of a nationwide group and do not necessarily apply to low BMI teenagers from Dallas with “professional management”.

This is largely from the paper entitled “Prostitution 2.0”. If you want to see for yourself it is at http://www.toddkendall.net/Pros20_Final.pdf

Thanks for the info and the link.

Lately, all my speculations are "fevered".

earning $2272 in a week while seeing 5.4 clients translates into $420 a client. these must be some great girls headed into the hdh level.

earning $2272 in a week while seeing 5.4 clients translates into $420 a client. these must be some great girls headed into the hdh level. Originally Posted by FWR

Perhaps...

But the reported $2272 weekly earnings and the 5.4 clients per week were both averages taken from all respondents. You can assume those averages equate to $420 per client...

Or you could account for the fact that the "technologically facilitated sex workers" who responded command anywhere from $200/hour to $1000/hour, or even more, based on the cumulative research data shared with me during my conversations with Cunningham. As in most statistical projects, the outliers somewhat skew the data set. And from what I understood of this particular project, the outliers probably tended to lean more heavily on the HDH side, as the HDH level ladies seemed to be more open and eager to participate in the survey than their </= $200/hour counterparts.

And it's interesting to note that Cunningham and Kendall specified the average number of clients seen, and the average income... but in reading over the report, I don't see the average number of hours "worked." So in any individual respondent, we could be dealing with a few high-dollar hourly sessions, several mid-range hourly sessions, or one multi-hour appointment plus a few mid-range hourly sessions.

Variables and outliers make all the difference.

It should be a simple matter to deal with any skewing of the mean average by looking at the median values for earnings. If the distribution isn't normal, the researcher could use nonparametrics and report interquartile ranges. If he doesn't want to do nonparametrics but he thinks there are two separate populations, it's viable to look at a measure of the central tendency (mean, median, or mode) and divide the data set into those values that fall below and above the central tendency and do separate analyses on each dataset. But what the fuck do I know?

Would be interesting to see a similar study of "clients" and how that would shake out. Times per week, $$ per year, age, activities, etc BMI numbers might be scary!!

Would be interesting to see a similar study of "clients" and how that would shake out. Times per week, $$ per year, age, activities, etc BMI numbers might be scary!! Originally Posted by JT10

I agree, both about the interest level and probability of very large BMI numbers among clients. The obvious problem is that clients are notoriously shy while workers have to make themselves consciously visible which is how Cunningham & Kendall were able to email tens of thousands of them.

BTW, yet another of these papers based on the SASP contains the statement,
"college-educated sex workers rate the attractiveness of their clients higher, roughly 0.37 points higher on a 10 point scale, which corresponds to a 6.3% increase over the mean value." If my very rudimentary remembered algebra is still any good I believe that means that all surveyed women rated their average customer as a 5.87 while college graduate sex workers rated theirs as a 6.24. I will post some more about that study later, if the indifferent heavens are willing and the creek don't rise.

I knew the earnings dollar figure would raise some male hackles. I can only remind the gentlemen again that this was a national study, not a local one, that it was done before the current recession/jobless "recovery" was well underway and that it may have indeed sampled some HDH ladies who are not much seen in our local cyberspace. It may have oversampled Las Vegas, NYC and other such places. I have not found any detailed data on where responses came from. I am hoping for a book eventually with all of everything.