OldestProfession2.0: A new generation
of local "providers" and "hobbyists" create a virtual
red-light district
By Keegan Hamilton
published: June 04, 2008
If you're researching auto repair on
the Internet and stumble across
www.stlasp.com, you might well hit your Web
browser's back button before noticing anything amiss.
"St. Louis Auto Specialists," the
banner proclaims, "brings you information on St. Louis
auto racing."
Read on, though, and you'll raise an
eyebrow. "This site is for entertainment purposes only.
It is a place where users can post fantasies or stories
for other members to view.... The information on this
site is intended for adult audiences only, by
definition, in the state of Missouri, you must be 18 or
older to view the information on this site...."
These folks must really love their
cars!
Beyond the homepage, it quickly
becomes evident that "STLASP" stands for "St. Louis
Adult Service Providers" — an entirely different kind of
body work. Here the "providers" are prostitutes — or, if
you like your euphemisms, escorts — and their customers
are "hobbyists." STLASP is the virtual forum in which
they discuss everything from gardening to philosophy to
how they prefer one another's pubic hair to be groomed.
They alert each other to possible police stings and scam
artists in the "erotic services" section of Craigslist.
And customers — seemingly all of them men — write and
post lengthy reviews of their experiences with the call
girls.
An escort herself, the site's creator
says she founded STLASP in June of last year after
moving to the St. Louis area from Southern California,
where she'd been involved in a nearly identical online
community. She found that the message board not only
made her job safer by allowing her to screen her
clients, it also created a tight-knit network of the
region's online escorts, providing a forum for them to
share knowledge, including concerns about potentially
dangerous johns.
"I'm trying to educate the women and
give them a chance to feel safe and feel a connection
with others that are in the same industry," says the
woman, who agreed to be interviewed for this story on
the condition that she not reveal her real name and that
she be referred to as "Mac."
"There's a lot of power in numbers.
I'm trying to educate them to be as independent as they
can and make smart choices."
The idea of escorts on the Internet is
nothing new — the oldest profession has long embraced
21st-century technology. But according to Stacey Swimme,
co-founder of sex worker-rights organizations the
Desiree Alliance and the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP)
Mac's site is part of an emerging national trend:
Prostitutes have turned to the Internet and small,
independently operated message boards as a means of
empowerment.
"From what I've been researching about
the sex industry over the past 25 years, that is the
biggest change," Swimme says. "Providers are talking to
each other. That is a force to be reckoned with. That is
where political power comes from, is that sort of
community-building."
STLASP's "Reviews" section contains
more than 7,000 posts. Many are based on a review
template in which "hobbyists" share their experiences
with local providers.
Examples:
Did the ASP's photos accurately
portray her?
Was she punctual?
Did she pressure you into tipping?
And, of course: "Activities between
consenting adults (what did you do)?"
The reviews are peppered with
abbreviations and jargon. An escort might be a "FOTC"
(fuck of the century) or a DFE ("dead fish experience").
When johns say "CMD" (carpet matches drapes) or
"Hardwood Floors," they're referring to their date's
body hair, not her taste in interior decorating.
While phrases like "She spoke French
without an interpreter" and "We took a trip to the
Mediterranean" carry one meaning in a newspaper travel
section, on STLASP they refer to oral sex without a
condom and anal sex, respectively.
Reviewers may wax passionate: "I would
advise you to take your vitamins, drink lots of fluids,
eat your Wheaties, and get plenty of rest before your
date," one recently wrote. "She will wear you out."
Or merely state the obvious: "The
massage is not therapeutic, not a professional style,
muscle-relaxing type massage. But if you enjoy a very
pretty girl spreading lotion all over your body, you
will be pleased."
The practice of posting online reviews
of escorts dates back about ten years. David Elms,
creator of The Erotic Review (www.theeroticreview.com),
claims his Web site was one of the first to encourage
men to provide feedback about their clandestine
encounters. Reached by phone in his Southern California
office, Elms explains that he got the idea after being
ripped off by a call girl.
"It was a way that people could be
held accountable for their actions in this industry,"
Elms says. "Now girls prefer that they find clients on
The Erotic Review. It already tells a guy all the juicy
details, so he doesn't have to ask stupid questions."
Elms says his Web site, created in
1999, now attracts more than 300,000 visitors a day, and
that half of the site's users log on more than once a
day. He collects information about each person who
registers an account and says the average hobbyist is
between 35 and 55 years old with a median income of
$80,000.
From the sex worker's-rights
perspective, Swimme has no qualms about the
commodification that is taking place. She suggests that
the practice of posting reviews adds legitimacy to an
otherwise illicit transaction. "I think that having
reviews in the sex industry to some degree makes a lot
of sense," she says. "It brings it into a realm that
says: This is a commercial exchange, a profession, a
service."
Elms goes as far as to compare the
john-escort dynamic to the purchase of expensive
electronics: "It's like a consumer-reports magazine that
has buyer reviews of car-stereo performance."
The quest for rave reviews and the
booming business that comes with them can be
hyper-competitive. One of the oldest and most popular
review Web sites,
bigdoggie.net, issues a twice-daily top-100 ranking
of escorts from across the nation based on ratings
tallied from user reviews.
The practice does have its critics.
Amanda Brooks, author of The Internet Escort's
Handbook, a three-part series first published in
2006 that professes to "address every question that a
woman could ask before she becomes a sex worker who
advertises through the Internet," points out that women
can be pressured into doing things they otherwise
wouldn't do, for fear of the online backlash.
"It has turned into, 'This girl is
totally great, she's going to do this and this and
this,'" says Brooks, who also contributes to Bound, Not
Gagged, a sex workers'-rights blog. "That's a big
problem, because girls will do sex activities that push
boundaries, but they do them because they could get a
good review and make money."
At STLASP, Mac says when she first got
into the business, the creator of one review site
pressured her to have sex with him in exchange for
positive reviews. "He said he could make me or break me
because his site was national and if I was smart I would
come visit him and have an appointment with him for
free," she recalls. "I told him no way."
Despite that experience, Mac remains a
strong advocate of posting the critiques "for the sake
of quality control." She admits, however, to having to
frequently mediate disputes about authenticity and
accuracy. Several times women have been caught creating
fake profiles in order to post positive evaluations of
themselves. Once, Mac says, a man posted a negative
review that an escort later claimed was completely off
base.
"I told her that she could write a
rebuttal to the review and she chose not to," Mac notes.
Elms says he has confronted similar
issues. "I look at the history of reviewer," he says.
"If, consistently, this reviewer's history shows he's
been accurate, no one has ever contested anything and he
has long-term membership, then I know that this is
probably pretty solid."
Then again, Elms adds, reviews are
rarely two thumbs down. "When you tell a story to a
couple of friends, obviously you're going to put
yourself in a good light," he notes. "When you tell a
story here, you're telling it to 100,000 of your closest
friends. You still have the male ego to deal with."
When Mac debuted STLASP a year ago,
she promoted it with a mere two posts on Craigslist.
Since then an average of 50 new people per day have
registered for user names. A counter at the bottom of
the site's main page tallies the current membership at
nearly 2,500; altogether they account for more than
19,000 posts.
Registration is free, and all that is
required to access the forums is an e-mail address, a
user name and a password. Fearing the site has began to
attract too much attention, Mac recently posted a
message saying she is considering a moratorium on new
memberships.
For a site that specializes in sex,
STLASP's appearance is remarkably sterile: blue text on
a plain gray-and-white background. The site is divided
into several sections, each of which contains its own
message boards. "Administration" features a glossary of
"hobby"-related abbreviations. In "Providers" users can
see which women are "Available Today" and browse the
personal Web pages of two dozen escorts. Most of the
posts are found in the "Hobbyists" section, which
features the "Discussion" board, where the men and women
tell jokes, swap stories and ask each other questions
about nearly everything under the sun.
Unlike other sites of its kind, STLASP
is devoid of advertisements. Mac says she has invested
several hundred dollars in software, server space and
the domain name. She estimates that she generally spends
multiple hours each week dealing with programming
glitches, creating new features and moderating disputes
between users. Having had no prior Web-design
experience, she concedes she may have gotten in over her
head with her not-for-profit endeavor.
"This does not define who I am as a
person," Mac says. "It's a very small aspect of my life.
The more I invest time into it, the more it becomes a
bigger part of my life. And since I've been spending
like five hours a night on this Web site, I'm like, 'Oh
my God, it's taking over now.'"
Swimme is impressed that the mind
behind STLASP is a woman's.
"I love to see when it's actually
service providers who are out founding these sites,"
Stacey Swimme says. "It's much more common for hobbyists
to create these communities. As an advocate, I'm always
thrilled to support the work of individual sex workers
who pioneer their own free-speech spaces."
In the world of STLASP, however, "free
speech" is a relative term. One of Mac's earliest posts
under her "Admin" handle is a lengthy "code of ethics"
that lays out rules for maintaining civil discourse. "Do
unto others, as you would have them do to you," she
writes. "Do not post against somebody in a rude or nasty
manner.... We all have a different perspective on life
and general topics so respect others and they will
respect you."
The software for the forums
automatically censors some content. Try to type the
words "sex" or "money" into a post and they're instantly
altered to "sensual fun" and "donation."
Such safeguards don't bar the site's
users from self-indulgence. Women post pictures of
themselves, often blurring their faces (but not much
else) in hopes of concealing their identity. Men ask
which local strip clubs offer "full service" and tip
each other off to "UTR" (under the radar) adult
establishments, such as a salon in a St. Louis suburb
that offers a haircut with a happy ending. They
frequently poke fun at their "Auto Specialists" pretext
with threads like: "Pole position-how do you prefer to
start the race."
Some exchanges border on the cerebral.
Observes one user in a February post on a lengthy thread
entitled "Morality, Ethics and the Hobby": "Our Western
society's anti-sensuality attitude foundations were laid
around 430 CE with the philosophy of St. Augustine. It
can be traced further back to the Gnostic Christians
rejection of the physical world and the body as well as
some of the letters of St. Paul."
"My personnel [sic] morals and
code of ethics calls to treat everyone with respect and
human dignity in all my interpersonal encounters," reads
one of the replies. "For hobbyists it means being a
gentleman with providers and treating them with the
utmost respect a gentlemen [sic] gives a lady.
For providers it means not treating the hobbyist as just
another envelope but as a fellow human being that wants
to do what comes naturally."
In another thread begun in March, a
poster writes, "The way I see it, indulging in this
hobby is wrong. But I still do it because there is
pleasure involved. I just haven't been able to cheat my
inner moral compass into believing that it is OK,"
concluding in all-boldface, "It's wrong. Still, I do
it."
In an e-mail in which he declined to
be interviewed for this story, STLASP's moderator, a
user Mac deputized to police the forums for spam and
other prohibited content who posts under the handle
"luvs2duit," described the STLASP community.
"There are a lot of very good people
in here," he writes. "The fact that they hobby doesn't
mean that they love their SOs [significant others] any
less, or meet their obligations to the community any
less, or are blatant in their choice of lifestyle."
He then requested that Riverfront
Times not pursue a story about STLASP:
"Our happy little life may be
seriously damaged because folks outside the community
will still view us as cheaters and perverts that violate
the social norms. The fact is, many of us are much
happier than our repressed neighbors."
A sandy blonde in her thirties, Mac
says she has been an escort for the past three years.
She says that in addition to working on a graduate
degree at an area university, she is her family's main
breadwinner. Fearing it would jeopardize her anonymity,
she declined a request to provide documents to support
her purported résumé.
Before moving to Missouri, Mac says,
she lived and attended college in Southern California. A
single mom at the time, she began working as a stripper
to make ends meet. Eventually, she says, she began
commuting to Las Vegas on the weekends to work at the
city's lucrative strip clubs. When she suffered a knee
injury and could no longer dance, she became an escort.
She says the decision was as easy as
clicking a mouse: She placed an ad in the "erotic
services" section of Craigslist.
Mac had little trouble emotionally
adjusting to her new lifestyle. "Actually it was kind of
exciting for me," she says sheepishly. "I know that
sounds funny, but it was actually exciting. It turned me
on. I liked it. I was like: 'Wow, this is something
really hot.'"
She is emphatic that she became an
escort on her own volition, that she has never had a
pimp and that she doesn't touch drugs. (During an
interview at a west-county bar that lasted several
hours, she didn't order a drink.)
She says she specializes in "GFE,"
commonly employed shorthand for "girlfriend experience."
The term is loosely defined, but Mac describes it as
doing anything the "ideal companion" would. Needless to
say, that includes the intimate act frowned upon in
Pretty Woman: kissing on the mouth. (Two GFE-related
entries from the "Abbreviations" glossary: DFK = Deep
French Kissing; LFK = Light Face Kissing.) It also
means, Mac says, being excited to see her date,
appearing to be genuinely interested in what they have
to say and not rushing to leave.
For her services, Mac charges anywhere
from $350 an hour to several thousand dollars for a
weekend or multiple-hour stay.
"I'm a like a therapist," she
explains. "Sometimes I'm a mom, sometimes I'm a wife,
sometimes a slut, sometimes I'm a girlfriend, a sister.
Sometimes people just need someone to care. So many
people are just unloved. There are times when I have an
appointment when I feel so good because I feel like I've
been able to touch somebody emotionally that maybe
hasn't been touched in a long time."
Asked directly whether she enjoys what
she does for a living, she responds, "I think that I do
like what I do most days. I make the schedule, I work
when I want to work and I don't when I don't. I choose
to do my job, I don't have to. That's a big deal in this
industry.
"If you're not sound emotionally, this
industry will tear you down," she adds. "There are
definitely days where it's maybe not a good day, where I
feel like it's affected me more. But those are few and
far between. If I'm having a bad day, it's not a good
day to be working. I think for some ladies, that can be
a pitfall."
Mac says her spouse knows about her
profession and approves of it. But, she adds, "My
biggest fear is always my kids finding out. Everything
else is just things that I can take care of. But that
will never leave my child if they ever found out. I
could never take that back."
Stacey Swimme says many women use
Craigslist as a jumping-off point into prostitution. The
anonymity the site affords users, coupled with the fact
that it's free, popular and easy to use, combine to
render it about as close as America currently comes to
the decriminalization of sex work.
"I think of Craigslist as training
wheels," says Swimme. "When a girl wants to work in the
sex industry, she ought to able to contact a local union
and ask, 'What kind of materials do I need? What
training do I need?' Since that's not available,
Craigslist is the easiest way."
It was the lack of resources for women
starting out in the field that spurred Amanda Brooks, a
Dallas-based former call girl, to author her Internet
Escort's Handbook.
"Craigslist is generally people who
haven't really studied the business, so they end up
taking a lot of risks," Brooks says when reached by
phone. "Often they don't screen [their customers], which
is very unsafe, and the men who surf Craigslist
generally aren't your better clients. And police have
been busting girls on there ever since it started."
"I didn't screen my clients at first,"
Mac says of her early Craigslist experience. "I was
really naive, I didn't know how to really protect
myself. I didn't know about a lot of message boards
[like STLASP]. I didn't know any of this, so I was
taking a big risk." Now she requires potential clients
to fill out an online form that includes home and work
phone numbers — which she calls to verify their
identities.
One of STLASP's most popular forums is
devoted exclusively to discussing Craigslist's "erotic
services" pages. Hundreds of posts come from users
asking their peers to verify that a particular ad isn't
a fake or a police sting. Another forum, "Alerts," is
devoted to pointing out "Robs" — escorts who show up
intending to blackmail a client.
"I take all posts [on Craigslist] with
a grain of salt," one user recently wrote. "There is so
much drama and cut throat [sic] practices on
there that almost everything on it is BS."
Mac says she has gone out of her way
enforce standards to make her site different from
Craigslist. Anyone who types in all-caps, can't spell
properly or relies too much on Web shorthand — all
trademarks of the red-light section of the San
Francisco-based classifieds site — is banned. (One of
the longest-running threads on STLASP is devoted to the
unintentionally hilarious misspellings and mistakes that
appear on Craigslist. (Two highlights: "I'm available
all mourning" and "Super Bowel specials.")
As Craigslist, chat rooms and
social-networking sites have skyrocketed in popularity,
they've increasingly become the focus of academic
research. Social scientists have begun to study how the
anonymity afforded by the medium affects human behavior.
Not surprisingly, some researchers have examined online
communities that focus on sex.
In a paper called "The Gender Dynamics
of Online Sex Talk," presented last year at the European
Gender and Internet Communication Technology Symposium
at the University of Helsinki, Chrystie Myketiak writes
that "[s]ocial expectations and norms work to keep
sexuality and sexual topics that, though culturally
ubiquitous, are considered bad taste to openly discuss.
On the Internet, people face fewer consequences for
deviating from dominant social norms and can explore
topics in ways that seem confidential and anonymous."
Myketiak, who is working toward a
Ph.D. at Queen Mary University of London, reached her
findings via "a qualitative analysis of more than two
years of conversational [chat] logs" on an Internet
forum.
Members of forums like STLASP have
begun to shed the veil of anonymity the Internet
provides. Many sites, STLASP included, host "meet and
greets" where prominent personalities on the board
gather at a local pub to match faces with screen names.
"It's so odd that escorts and clients
are talking and having socials," says Internet
Escort's Handbook author Brooks. "That has no
historical precedent. Honestly, it's a new thing the
Internet has spawned — and there's nothing wrong with
it."
A thread on STLASP is devoted to a
recent "happy hour" gathering at Flamingo Bowl downtown.
The group reserved lanes under their "auto specialists"
guise.
"The great thing about an event like
this is that you get to talk to folks and learn so much
more than we do online," moderator "luvs2duit" wrote
afterward. "The ladies get a chance to place a face and
personality with the screen names and posts they have
seen online. These events are a wonderful chance to
break the ice."
A user observed that many of the
working women in attendance didn't look much like
mechanics:
"It was fun watching the
non-associated males in the place and the ones walking
on the street outside get whiplash from their double
takes."
Not all online escort reviews are as
prim and proper as STLASP. One site,
usasexguide.info, features reviews of streetwalkers.
There are forums devoted exclusively to "the strolls" of
Brooklyn and Washington Park, Illinois, whose posts are
littered with references to drugs, pimps and abuse.
On STLASP, in a January thread titled
"How many providers did you see in 2007," most members
said they stuck with "professional providers" —
including one man who estimated that he spent $13,000 on
his "hobby." Still, several users wrote that they
frequently picked up women on the street.
For Mac, it's a troubling reality that
she says she wants to avoid. "I don't even want to
entertain the idea of reviewing streetwalkers," she
says. "It's a whole different industry that I know
nothing about. There's been a lot of gripes from other
ladies on the board saying they don't want it either.
"I don't want to make any negative
remarks toward these women," she hastens to add. "In
fact, I have a lot of compassion for them. But the risks
that they take are so huge that it's scary to me."
Of course, risk isn't limited to
street hookers. In addition to sexually transmitted
disease, the threat of local law enforcement looms for
online operators.
"Escort services, whether online or
not, are basically prostitution," asserts assistant
United States attorney Howard Marcus, who is based in
St. Louis. "Most of the women that end up working in
this area are all, despite what they might say, victims.
It takes a toll on your life, it takes a toll on your
family life. Many have a history of alcoholism, drug
abuse and domestic problems. There's typically a
traumatic event, some kind of abuse, that leads them
into this line of work."
Marcus says the most common charges
stemming from investigations of online escort rings are
money laundering and, because many sites are hosted on
servers located in another state, the use of interstate
facilities to promote prostitution. The latter crime
carries a minimum five-year sentence and a $250,000
fine.
One St. Louis-area municipality,
Maryland Heights, has gained a reputation for its tough
stance on online prostitution. STLASP users report that
the city frequently conducts stings on Craigslist and
backpage.com.
"I don't like to see anyone [provider
or hobbyist] get popped," one poster wrote last month.
"But if a person is dumb enough to work out of/make an
appointment in MH...it serves them right IMHO."
A spokesman for the Maryland Heights
police department did not return calls seeking comment
for this story.
The STLASP community takes several
precautions when it comes to dealing with law
enforcement. Most women require at least two
"references" from fellow escorts before seeing a new
customer. Some ask their clientele to use the online
identity-verification services at
date-check.com or
preferred411.com.
Mac looks forward to the day
prostitution law is reformed and references become
aboveboard. "I think that there should be some
regulations," she allows. "But I do think that it should
be legal. I think that people should have to get a
license to do it. I think that they should have
regulations on health checkups and have certain
guidelines so people are safe and healthy and make sure
that they are not working on the street."
In the meantime, Swimme, who once
marched topless around San Francisco's federal building
in protest of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's
strict policies on prostitution, says women will
increasingly turn to sites like STLASP as a means of
protecting themselves:
"As long as prostitution is illegal,
people will be dependent on these types of forums to
stay safe."
Mac agrees. She and others on STLASP
keep a blacklist of men who have hygiene problems or who
they feel might be dangerous. One of the features on the
site she's most proud of is the "Ladies Only" forum.
"We have what we call the 'woman to
woman,'" Mac explains. "We talk amongst ourselves about
any topic — it could be about the business or not. We're
just helping each other out. If we can stay together and
inform each other, there's a lot of power in that. It's
like social capital.
"To me, that's what this is: We're
building social capital."
Original link on River Front Times
