Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Sex workers are surviving the dot-com bust, but they too mourn the days of easy venture capital and IPO-inspired lust.
May 8, 2001 | "This industry transcends market fluctuations," says Annalise Ophelian, who has been working as a dominatrix in San Francisco since 1995. For about $250 an hour, Ophelian straps on 5-inch heels and a leather corset and turns her dungeon into a haven for flogging, whipping, humiliation and other forms of B&D and S/M (bondage and domination and sadomasochism). But today Ophelian looks sweet and stylish as she sips a cup of tea. Her brown hair flows over the shoulders of a colorful T-shirt. She looks intently across the table and assures me, "The erotic industry in San Francisco is a booming one that certainly rode the crest of dot-com-ism, and profited from it greatly, but is not going to disappear because the dot-commers went away."
Even so, Ophelian admits that business is slower than it was at the height of new-economy fervor. Some customers schedule one-hour sessions where they once asked for three- or four-hour ones. The clientele has changed or, rather, much like the economy at large, has been "corrected." Last year Ophelian had an influx of 22-year-old clients who were eager to experiment with professional domination as the "extreme sport" of the sex industry. "But after the October dip in the stock market, all the young ones left," she says. Now her client base consists of old-economy reliables. "All my 45-year-old CFOs are still around," she says.
Dancers at Bay Area strip clubs are also feeling the pinch. At a famous San Francisco club where bare-breasted women hustle customers for lap dances in private booths, one employee said she's bringing home about half the tips she was a year ago. The dancers at this club receive no wages, they work only for tips and they are required to pay a "stage fee" of more than $200 for each shift they work. It was a lucrative job when the economy was good, but now working conditions are tougher.
The oldest profession and the newest profession became intertwined when young and suddenly rich high-tech bachelors set off a boom in the Bay Area's sex industry in the late 1990s. While working as a research assistant on "The Center of the World," Wayne Wang's film about sex and the dot-com economy, I heard about numerous incidents of the sex-tech embrace. Baby-faced CEOs scheduled three-hour sessions with professional dominatrixes. Socially awkward computer programmers hired high-class prostitutes to escort them to Silicon Valley functions. Start-ups celebrated successful IPOs in Las Vegas brothels.
Plenty of venture capital has been tucked under the elastic waistband of a stripper's G-string. And plenty of B2B (business to business) deals have been signed because of the attentive service she gave to a customer's business client. Some local sex workers even told me that they ended up benefiting twice from the high-tech gold rush of the late 1990s. First they made profits from the influx of wealthy young men wanting to pay for affection. Then a few were hired as writers and marketers for their customers' companies.
But the synergy between the sex industry and the tech industry has its downside. The cash a stripper brings home ebbs and flows with her clients' stock portfolios. So many women working in the sex industry have seen a decline in business as the flurry of instant wealth, so prominent in the late 1990s, has dissipated. But despite dwindling income from new-economy types, many Bay Area sex workers are smug. They realize that while dot-coms may come and go, they're in an industry that will always persevere. And if the sex industry follows the same trend it has over the past 30 years, it won't just persevere -- it will continue to grow. As jobs that require constant flexibility and long hours spent in front of a computer become more commonplace, many men have less time to date. Instead of fostering mutually fulfilling relationships (which are time-consuming), they're paying for sexual gratification as a service akin to take-out food or wash 'n' fold launderettes. Sex in the new economy is just another outsourced job perfect for independent contractors.
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