A consumer guide to prostitutes is a click away

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For escorts, a complicated relationship
Professional escorts have a love-hate relationship with The Erotic Review and Big Doggie, where, for a monthly or quarterly fee, men can find out exactly what a woman’s customers think of her.

The sites represent the ultimate commodification of women, who are impersonally rated by anonymous men in much the same way they would judge a sports car or a racehorse. Some find it demeaning, but most acknowledge that it’s a fast, easy way to build a reliable client base.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Helen, a $350-an-hour escort in a Western state, who said she was in the business to make enough money to go to graduate school so she could teach.

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“Yes, it does give you exposure that you may not otherwise get,” she said. But at the same time, an escort can find her livelihood held hostage to the whims of a customer who doesn’t get exactly what he wants, at the price he wants to pay.

“This lady spoke to a client she considered a friend, and she was apparently very upset because the guy had threatened to post a bad review,” Helen said. “I’ve personally never had it happen, but I know it has happened.”

The sites serve another purpose, too: They make prostitution a little safer, because women can challenge unfair or inaccurate reviews in forums on the sites and they can lodge complaints with site administrators.

Much more than streetwalkers or prostitutes who are controlled by pimps, a professional escort has a significant element of control, because she can screen potential clients, who already know how pricey her services are — top-dollar escorts in New York have been known to command $2,000 an hour.

That control is elevated when a client comes to her through a review site. Reviewers earn credibility by the accuracy of their reviews, so over time, an escort can essentially rate the men who are rating her.

Robyn Few, a former prostitute who lobbies to decriminalize prostitution as executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in San Francisco, said that on a personal level, “I hate it” that women are “being reviewed and rated like some subhuman.”

But she added: “The Erotic Review and Big Doggie took some of the danger out of it. When providers have a bad client, they write about it. ... It’s one way to out the bad guys.”

Billie, who said she got at least 90 percent of her business through The Erotic Review and a similar local review site, said: “I haven’t had a bad experience at all. The people that I have seen, or whatever, they have all been professionals — really upper-class people.”

Cleaning up prostitution
If nothing else, Few and many escorts say, the success of The Erotic Review and Big Doggie demonstrate that prostitution can be a respectable business. For the first time, the women are not victims, they say — they are not walking the streets, and they are relatively protected, and they run their own business affairs.

Now it is the customer who must solicit the prostitute, not the other way around, as it has always been through history. From the safety and relative anonymity of their living rooms, highly rated independent escorts like Billie and Helen can pick and choose from hundreds of potential clients.

“I pretty much have regular clients now,” said Billie, whose ratings are consistently 8 to 10 (out of 10) for both appearance and “performance.” These are men whom she has screened and whom she trusts, and she thinks that’s why “I’ve never been cheated or anything.”

In the future, the balance of power will shift more and more to women who approach prostitution as a profession and can take advantage of advances in technology, said Few, the sex workers advocate.

“We are not going to stop prostitution. We are not going to stop it,” she said. “It is not going to be abolished. It is not going away. And the Internet has connected us around the world.”

Said Helen, the escort from the West: “Technology increases exponentially. So who knows what’s going to be out there in 10 years?”

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