An update to the world's oldest profession. With modern technology.

From the Daily Beast. How young savy ladies of the evening, call girls, what ever you call them are using modern technology for their own business.

The Oldest Profession Evolves—How the Web Transformed Prostitution

The Internet has lowered the bar for entry, and brought new buyers and sellers into the sex market, reports Greg Gilderman.

An interview with "Brittany," a sex worker who got her start on Craigslist and Backpage.com

Once upon a time, becoming a prostitute was difficult.

In, say, 1992, you could risk your life as a streetwalker—if you lived near a street where one could walk provocatively and reasonably expect to find customers. You could make and place an ad for sexual services in your local alternative weekly, at least if you lived in a city—but the responses wouldn’t begin until well after said weekly was printed and distributed. Of course, there were brothels, massage parlors, agencies, and so on back then, even an escorts section of the yellow pages. But it wasn’t as if any 20-year-old with a flash of curiosity about sex work could within hours find a client or a pimp and go into business selling herself.


Which brings us to 2012, and Room 216 of a Holiday Inn, somewhere in New Jersey.

It’s early afternoon and a 23-year-old college student—she asked that we use the name Brittany—is sitting on the room’s leather couch, waiting for the first of the day’s three clients to arrive, talking to me about her job. Brittany is blonde, attractive but not beautiful, a native of a blue-collar town in Camden County, N.J.

In a few hours she’ll be counting out nearly two thousand dollars in cash, not including $300 one of the men, a new client, deposited in advance into her PayPal account.

“I feel like on TV, you see things like the escorts are all crackheads,” she tells me. “They do drugs. They have pimps. They were abused by their parents and they were strippers. Not all of that is true.”

She’s part of a group of prostitutes who some have called the profession’s silent majority: independent, part-time, doing it as a matter of choice after entering the business by placing their own ad on public classified sites, and often keeping the work private from friends and family.

“When you take the profile of Internet prostitutes versus street prostitutes, you find there’s more education, and that more work temporarily, then exit,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University who has studied the impact of the Internet on prostitution markets. “They also are significantly less likely to work for a pimp.”

Internet prostitutes even look different than street prostitutes, according to Cunningham. He found that when Craigslist first entered a new area—this was in the days when it still had its “erotic services” category—the body weight of the women advertising sex gradually shifted to, in his words, “a more athletic body type. It moves from less attractive to more attractive in the eyes of the john.”

'When you take the profile of Internet prostitutes versus street prostitutes, you find there’s more education, and that more work temporarily, then exit.'

While critics have charged classified sites with facilitating sex trafficking, for women like Brittany, who have freely chosen prostitution and whose clients freely choose them, the Internet has made the transactions fast, simple, and discreet. New research suggests it hasn’t merely moved online and indoors those who once worked the street, but done something more transformative: created a different sort of sex worker—more educated, younger—and a bigger market of women selling sexual services in the United States and men purchasing those services.

If fewer women found a path into prostitution in the pre-Internet era, the same held true for johns: there was simply no practical way for a man to compare the looks and prices of large numbers of escorts, anonymously contact them, and receive reliable information that a provider was, in fact, not working for the police. Craigslist changed that.
An audio slide show featuring "Iris," a 19-year-old, Philadelphia-based sex worker who got her start on Craigslist

Until 2009, the hugely popular classifieds site offered sex ads, with no charge to post or read. There had always been sex ads on the Internet, in chat rooms or niche websites, but their presence on Craigslist was something like the difference between a brothel on a side street in the bad part of town and a brothel in the Mall of America. On a single day in 2007, The New York Times reports, nearly “9,000 listings were added to the site’s ‘Erotic Services’ category in the New York region alone.”...

Who say there are no jobs in Obama's America! OK ladies, a business opportunity...just saying ;<)

In all seriousness this is an intersting read and watch the video's.