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Join Date: Dec 30, 2009
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Posts: 1,671
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I've previously posted about how the local hobby scene has completely deteriorated from what it once was - in other words, what changed about the experience and the available options within the scene, from a client perspective. In this post, I'll try to describe *why* I think that happened. This might not be a popular take on this issue, but I call it the way I see it...
Once upon a time, long ago, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, it really was not that easy for a woman to get into the business on her own behalf, other than by walking the streets. It was difficult, and it was expensive, to do so. There was no Indys, there was no Backpage, there were really no online sites to advertise. Adult services were advertised in print. Little ads in the back of "alternative" newspapers like the "City Paper" and "In Pittsburgh", ads in semi-underground publications (that were only sold in adult bookstores) like "American Sex Scene", and - oddly enough - the Yellow Pages... Cell phones were not common (and even into the late 1990's were very expensive, and there was no such thing as prepaid - I got my first cell phone in the mid 1990's, you had to pay per minute that you used the phone in addition to a monthly service fee, and Cellular One made me pay a $1000 deposit in case I ran up a big bill and tried to skip out on it, even after running a credit check), so you would need to get a separate landline phone line for the business. If you were running a service, you'd have to pay for pagers for all of the women who worked for the service. All this required quite a bit of money, and quite a bit of patience. You had to buy the phone lines, you had to deal with all of the publications you wanted to run print ads in, you had to pay for each of those ads. You had to realize that, once you bought an ad, depending on what publication it was to be published in and what their publication schedule was, it could be anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months before the ad even ran - if you were a new service and you wanted to advertise in the Yellow Pages (which many of the services got a lot of their business through, particularly from business travelers), it could literally be *several months* before a directory was distributed that had your listing in it. There was certainly nothing like, "make a post on Craigslist this afternoon to try to make some money tonight."
As a result of all this, a great many of the hobby options available at that time (going back to, say, the heyday of ASPD) that didn't involve looking for providers on the streets, were services (and the ones that weren't were women who generally had some good business sense, wanted to make decent money, knew they had to make an investment of time and money in advance to make it happen, and knew they had to be patient and build up their clientele over time). These services were run by people whose primary goal was to make money - and they were run like a "real" business, for the most part. And the owners of the services were very much aware that the bulk of their income was going to come from repeat clients, so they wanted the clients to be satisfied. The rates charged by these services were significant (some more than others), but they were not crazy outrageous like the high-end travelling agencies. They were locally based, they employed local girls, and their clients were mostly local too. Since their primary goal was to make a bunch of money, from repeat business, they kept the rates as high as they could - but not so high to "kill off the Golden Goose", so to speak. For example, you might not have the means to see a girl from Sheer Elegance more than once every month or two - but you wouldn't have to take out a second mortgage on your house to afford an appointment, either.
One aspect of a service running like "a real business" was that, operationally, the women were treated much like employees at any other business. From a client perspective, this meant, for example, that I could call somewhere like Roman V and ask "Is Cindy available?", and they'd tell me, "No, Cindy will be available on Thursday between 6pm and 1am" - and then I'd go in on Thursday night, and lo and behold, she was actually there! Like, really physically present, during her entire scheduled shift - not "available on call", and they'd try to get hold of her if someone called looking for her. Similar with the outcall escort services - I could call ahead of time, and actually know when the lady I wanted to see was going to be available to see me, even if it was on a different night.
The reason this ended up working out to make this environment "good" for clients, was that all of the girls had someone else they had to answer to, other than the client. Which meant that if a girl tried to rip off or short-change a client, it would be dealt with. If a girl clearly was trying to get in and out of the session as quickly as possible, you'd call and speak to the owner of the service, and it was taken care of. I had future sessions comp'ed by service owners, when things went really badly - for example, one time I set something up with a service that I'd used multiple times previously, and the owner (who was a woman, FWIW) told me that she had a new girl that she thought I'd like, but didn't make me aware that I was going to be her very first appointment, ever... The girl arrived, I paid her the agency fee, we moved into the bedroom, and she just started talking, and talking, and talking ... when I eventually stopped her and suggested that we both get naked, she just broke down in tears, and started bawling, "I can't do this! I'm really sorry, but I can't do this - I just can't!" - and she picked up her stuff and ran... I called back and told the owner what happened - and I got my agency fee comp'ed on the next session (and needless to say, that girl didn't work for them beyond that night...). In short - in that environment, if a girl actually wanted to work (and wanted to get the money that would be available by seeing clients), she not only had to make the client happy, she had to make the service owner happy too. If there were too many complaints about someone, the service owner had the ultimate veto power, and the girl would just be taken off the schedule. It wasn't like she could just go off and do it on her own instead (for the reasons I've outlined), and there were only a finite number of other services she could hook up with before she got herself blacklisted with every service (and thus unable to work in the adult services industry at all).
This was pretty good for clients, but I know it could be pretty bad for the girls. Some of the service owners were real bastards. The ones I think were the best for the girls were the ones run by women - Sheer Elegance and Cachet International come to mind. (Then again - I once made an error in judgement I'd never do today, and paid Sheer Elegance by credit card - and when I got the bill, the charge was run through a pizza place in Northern New Jersey... Hmm, wonder what that indicates...) I know that Darren at Elite Entertainment (not to be confused with Elite Tanning) was rather infamous for treating clients with kid gloves, but treating the girls like crap and pressuring them for sex in exchange for being allowed to keep working.
Then, over a period of time, Indys, and Backpage, and other sites like these came along. And it suddenly became much more plausible for individual girls to do their own thing, on their own schedules. Most of this first generation of online providers had one thing in common - they had previously worked for services. So they had enough experience to know how things worked, and the smart ones knew the importance of building up a steady clientele and they knew that they could undercut the rates charged by the services, provide basically the same level of service to the same client base, and actually end up with more money for themselves. We, as hobbyists, started to abandon the services. And why wouldn't we? Why would we call a service to see someone (and pay a higher rate), when we knew that many of the same girls we were use to seeing were now becoming available independently, usually at a lower rate?
The services couldn't survive this, and began to collapse. The girls were leaving the services in droves, and the ones they could retain (sort of...) were not particularly responsible or reliable. I could tell the end was coming when stuff started to happen like, I'd call Exotic Memories and book an appointment with someone, and then I'd get there - and instead of seeing like 3 girls in the living room when I arrived (as I'd been used to - and you could even usually change your mind when you got there and see someone else when you saw the line-up, though I never did), I would find *nobody* in the living room, except the owner - who would tell me, "I'm really sorry man, I've been trying to get hold of her for the last hour and a half, but she's not answering her pager - you're probably going to have to come back another time..." Sadly, stuff like this was also a portent of things to come far in the future, as we're seeing right now... Eventually, all of the services disappeared. I waited to see when new ones would arise - but none ever did. The only service from that era that still exists is Elite Tanning, and I'm not sure how they even stay in business.
At that point, we still had most of that first generation of Internet-based providers who had previously worked for the old services. And things were actually pretty cool, for a while. New girls would "discover" this new online escorting world, and often one of the more established girls would take a newbie under her wing and kind of show her how things were done, and how to succeed in the business. That worked OK for a while.
And then ... groups of providers like "Local 250" started to appear, who wanted to manipulate the hobby economy by driving up rates, and driving down expectations on level of service, assuming (possibly with some validity, who can say...) that men would pay basically whatever they were asked for the privilege of just being in the same room with a naked woman, and that they could use this "fact" to extract as much money as they could from clients, while doing as little as possible to get it. Newer providers (some of whom were actually asking for a reasonable rate at the time) were pressured to raise their rates, or lower the level of service they provided (do you remember any of the flame wars at the time, where some of these "Local 250" providers were railing about how any provider that did BBBJ was a danger to the community, and needed to be run out of town on a rail? Basically taking that position to try to ensure that *they* would not be expected to do it, and couldn't really be taken to task if they didn't...), or both. When a new provider wouldn't "play ball" with this strategy, there were organized efforts to drive them out of the community entirely. The same groups also did whatever they could to discourage "outside" providers from visiting the area and taking a bite out of the income of local providers. When I was a mod on ASPD, I saw multiple instances of this (because the providers who were affected came to me, as a moderator, to try to get me to "do something about it" - as if there actually was anything that I could do about it, as someone who was just a moderator on a message board) - the "organizers" of the effort would have their allies book a visiting provider's calendar solid before she ever even got here - and then when she finally arrived, they would basically *all* NS/NC her, en masse... To this day, you *still* hear about travelling providers who won't come to Pittsburgh, because Pittsburgh hobbyists have a reputation as no-shows - and this one of the primary reasons why...
At some point during all of this, the "law of large numbers" started to affect the various escort advertising sites, since it had become just so easy for any girl to decide to "hang out their shingle" and start taking appointments. The problem was, since it was so easy that anyone could to it - everyone started doing it. Including many girls who would have previously been plying their trade on the streets. Especially since many of them realized that they could charge more than they had been (but less than the "going rate") for their services. Sure, a lot of them "cleaned it up" a little for their Internet presence. But they were still doing "car dates" (which to this day, I can not wrap my head around why that's something anyone would even want to do), or seeing clients in fleabag motels in all the "usual areas", or (the most recent innovation) stating that they would do outcalls but that the client has to provide transportation or pick them up... And worse, they generally just don't care if the client is happy, or if they come back. They just care about getting $80 or whatever, *right now*. Whether you actually are interested in ever seeing them again or not is irrelevant - next time they need money, there will be someone else. There always is... This, unfortunately, started a "race to the bottom". They asked for a lot less than the "going rate", and even though there were regularly complaints from guys about these girls and their level of service, dangerous personal habits, and other such things, enough guys started migrating towards these providers that the "level" of providers above this sort of collapsed - I don't think they could get enough appointments at a rate that would be worthwhile for them, to even stay in the business. So they left. I still don't understand where they went - I guess it's true that some went to SA or found some other kind of "sugar baby" kind of arrangements on a UTR basis. But what they are currently not, is generally available to see hobbyists, as we were all previously used to.
And now, to some extent, it's come full circle from that point - hobbyists, as a community, now complain consistently that we can't find anyone reasonable to see, for a reasonable appointment, at a reasonable rate - that the only options that seem to be out there are providers who are way to difficult to schedule with, who want way too much money and way too much personal information - and on the other end of the spectrum, there are "hoodrats" who ask for donations that are affordable (and even a lot less than even what most of us would think of as "reasonable"), but who are too unreliable, too rushed, who have personal hobbies that give us a great deal of concern, and who in many cases we consider to be just plain dangerous to spend any time at all with (so maybe it's a blessing that they usually rush through their appointments...). And that there really isn't much of anything in between.
I've probably left out a bunch of steps in the history that got us here - and I know that this is already so long that a lot of you aren't even going to read it... :-) The sequence of events that led us to this place is long, and complex. And I haven't even said anything about things like FOSTA/SESTA and the general social crackdowns on the hobby. But as far as why things are so bad right now, and why we find ourselves in the situation at hand - I submit to you that, in many ways, gentlemen, we have met the enemy, and he is us...
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