Economía de la prostitución

Selling sex
Jan 17th 2008

Economists let some light in on the shady market for paid sex

IT IS all too easy to become a lost soul in New Orleans. The annual meeting of the American Economic Association this month was part of a huge gathering of social scientists sprawled across the city. Each venue itself was a warren of meeting rooms. Take a wrong turning and a delegate seeking an earnest symposium on minimum wages might innocently end up in the conference session devoted to the market for paid sex.

The star attraction there was Steven Levitt, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of “Freakonomics”, a best-selling book. Mr Levitt presented preliminary findings* from a study conducted with Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University. Their research on the economics of street prostitution combines official arrest records with data on 2,200 “tricks” (transactions), collected by Mr Venkatesh in co-operation with sex workers in three Chicago districts.

The results are fascinating. Almost half of the city’s arrests for prostitution take place in just 0.3% of its street corners. The industry is concentrated in so few locations because prostitutes and their clients need to be able to find each other. Earnings are high compared with other jobs. Sex workers receive $25-30 per hour, roughly four times what they could expect outside prostitution. Yet this wage premium seems paltry considering the stigma and inherent risks. Sex without a condom is the norm, so the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) is high. Mr Levitt reckons that sex workers can expect to be violently assaulted once a month. The risk of legal action is low. Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.

Mercado de parejas

A buyers’ market
Dec 13th 2007

Men propose; women dispose

WOMEN often complain that dating is like a cattle market, and a paper just published in Biology Letters by Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle of Newcastle University, in England, suggests they are right. They have little cause for complaint, however, because the paper also suggests that in this particular market, it is women who are the buyers.

Mr Pollet and Dr Nettle were looking for evidence to support the contention that women choose men of high status and resources, as well as good looks. That may sound common sense, but it was often denied by social scientists until a group of researchers who called themselves evolutionary psychologists started investigating the matter two decades ago. Since then, a series of experiments in laboratories have supported the contention. But as all zoologists know, experiments can only tell you so much. Eventually, you have to look at natural populations.

And that is what Mr Pollet and Dr Nettle have done. They have examined data from the 1910 census of the United States of America and discovered that marriage is, indeed, a market. Moreover, as in any market, a scarcity of buyers means the sellers have to have particularly attractive goods on offer if they are to make the exchange.

Consumismo, necesidades, deseos y apetencias

Leyendo Las arquitecturas del deseo de José Antonio Marina he encontrado una cita maravillosa que distingue con gran claridad entre necesidades, deseos y apetencias. En seguida me ha venido a la cabeza lo útil que sería enseñar a los adolescentes las diferencias entre estos conceptos en las clases de educación sexual. Así que os la dejo aquí por si os resulta de provecho. Por cierto, la cita no es de Marina sino de un libro sobre publicidad, escrito por el Grupo Marcuse, titulado De la miseria humana en el medio publicitario (Melusina, 2006)

El consumismo actúa en un plano muy distinto, el de las apetencias. Que algo nos apetezca significa por un lado que ese algo nos es indispensable (no es una necesidad) y por otro lado que no lo anhelamos desde lo más profundo de nuestro ser (no es un verdadero deseo). Las apetencias sociales son sociales y fugaces, siempre relativas a individuos cuyo estatus envidiamos. La publicidad las azuza. Recurre a modelos que dan envidia, hace apetentes a los consumidores y los fuerza a un mimetismo tan caprichoso como rápida es la renovación de las panoplias que hay que poseer para identificarse con los estereotipos que propone. El consumismo es el mundo social de las apetencias y el reino momentáneo de los caprichos. Por eso no debe sorprender que no sea demasiado satisfactorio. El placer es proporcional a la intensidad del deseo, que cree con el tiempo de la privación. La apetencia es el grado cero del deseo. Ceder a ella no aporta más que un breve y limitado placer, como puede verse en los ninños consentidos o con la “depresión poscompra”. La excitación aumenta hasta pasar por caja, y se desvanece tan rápido como había aparecido. La apetencia es fundamentalmente una pasión triste (Spinoza). Cargada de resentimiento, solo engendra frustración, porque siempre habrá alguien y algo que apetecer. Ése es precisamente el ardid del consumismo. Puesto que se basa sólo en apetencias, se alimentará a sí mismo en una huida hacia adelante que, si no tiene el mérito de satisfacer a las personas, por lo menos lubrica la maquinaria capitalista.

El negocio de la adicción sexual

Addicted to love?
Debate simmers over whether sex addiction truly exists
By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 9:51 a.m. ET Nov. 8, 2007

Hello. My name is Brian and I am a sex addict.

It never occurred to me that I might be addicted to love. But then Marty Klein, a sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., and author of the book “America’s War on Sex,” asked me to take a Web screening test created by Patrick Carnes, the best-known popularizer of the “sex addict” idea.

I answered all the questions as honestly as I could, but some seemed awfully vague — “Do you often find yourself preoccupied with sexual thoughts?” — or rather commonplace — “Have you subscribed to or regularly purchased or rented sexually explicit materials (magazines, videos, books or online pornography)?” But then Carnes’ definition of sex addiction itself can be vague: “Sexual addiction is defined as any sexually-related, compulsive behavior which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and one’s work environment.”

That may seem specific but it all depends on how one defines “compulsive” and the effects on others who may or may not be disturbed by another’s sexual proclivities.

Anyway, here is what I was told: “We have compared your answers with people who have been diagnosed with sex addiction. Your answers HAVE MET a score on [the] basis of six [of] the criteria that indicate sex addiction is present.”

Don’t feel bad, Klein told me. He often asks professional audiences to take the same test and a lot of them come up sex addicts, too, which may say something about therapists, but more, perhaps, about the test.

La revolución de los solteros

LA REVOLUCIÓN DE LOS ‘SINGLES’

Andrés Pérez

Un nuevo segmento comercial ha emergido en la primera década del siglo XXI. Son ricos, felices y viven solos en pisos céntricos. Sin embargo, lo que la sociedad olvida –o silencia– es la otra cara de estos neosolteros: pobres sin interés para el marketing, divorciados, parados e ignorados por el mercado.

Hace unos años, una broma pesada corría en el mundo de los negocios a propósito del segmento de mercado entonces de moda, al descubrirse el envejecimiento de la pirámide de población: los llamados seniors. La broma rezaba así: “¿Cuál es la diferencia entre un viejo y un senior?”. Y la respuesta, que se suponía debía dejar estupefacto al interlocutor de turno, antes de hacerle reír a carcajadas, decía así: “30.000 euros en la cuenta corriente. Si el viejo los tiene, es un senior; si no, no es más que un viejo”. Este chiste tiene garantizado un próspero futuro con el nuevo segmento del mercado puesto de moda por la gente de los negocios en esta primera década del siglo XXI. Se trata de los llamados singles o, si prefiere, los neosolteros.

Porque, ¿cuál es la diferencia entre un solterón fracasado, que no encuentra pareja, desempleado, ignorado por todos, aislado y sin recursos en un barrio deprimido, y uno de esos estelares singles, célibattants, solos y neosolteros tan en boga en las revistas de último grito, en las series de televisión de mayor éxito, categoría ascendente de nuestras sociedades, objeto de toda la luz de los proyectores del planeta? Obligado reconocer que la única diferencia es el poder adquisitivo. Poderoso caballero: ha hecho perder la brújula a los medios de comunicación, que desbordan ríos de tinta sobre un supuesto mundo de solos libres, felices y ricos, cuando todos los indicadores señalan que las tasas de pobreza son brutalmente elevadas en el mundo de los solteros.

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

EVA RODRÍGUEZ ARMARIO
EL PAÍS - 18-09-2007

Durante mucho tiempo se ha hablado del recurso al aborto como una prestación casi exclusiva de la sanidad privada debido a que las clínicas acreditadas para el aborto en España vinieron a cubrir una necesidad social que ningún otro colectivo se atrevió a solucionar. De hecho, fue un grupo de profesionales el que decidió atender esta necesidad y soportar individualmente los posibles problemas legales, civiles y penales, creando una serie de centros médicos que dieran una solución digna a la demanda de unas mujeres que hasta ese momento tenían que hacer turismo abortivo o arriesgar su vida para abortar. Esta realidad innegable nos lleva a preguntarnos acerca de las causas que han propiciado que el 97% de los abortos se realice en clínicas privadas.
Para la Asociación de Clínicas Acreditadas para la Interrupción del Embarazo (ACAI), la ambigüedad de las dos principales leyes que regularon la interrupción del embarazo (la Ley del Aborto 9/1985, de 5 de julio, y el Real Decreto 2409/1986, de 21 de noviembre) ha sido un elemento clave para que fueran las clínicas privadas, y no los hospitales públicos, las que llevaran a cabo esta prestación. La ambigüedad procede de que la ley sólo autoriza la interrupción del embarazo en los casos de violación, malformación del feto y grave peligro físico o psíquico de la embarazada, y exige para ello unos requisitos basados en dictámenes preceptivos.

Dilemas éticos en la donación de óvulos

May 15, 2007
The Consumer
As Demand for Donor Eggs Soars, High Prices Stir Ethical Concerns
By RONI CARYN RABIN

Samantha Carolan was 23 and fresh out of graduate school when she decided to donate eggs to an infertile couple. Ms. Carolan concedes that she would never have done it if not for the money, $7,000 that she used to pay off some student loans.

She has since had a second egg extraction, for which she was paid $8,000, and she is planning a third before taking a break.

“The first time, it’s frightening,” said Ms. Carolan, now 24, of Winfield Park, N.J. “It is surgery, and I don’t think I would have done it without compensation. But I had very limited pain, and it was a great experience for me. I would have done it the second time for less money or even no compensation.”

Though many egg donors derive great satisfaction from knowing that they helped someone start a family, the price of eggs has soared in recent years as demand has increased, and the sizable payments raise controversy.

A survey published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility, “What Is Happening to the Price of Eggs?” found that the national average compensation for donors was $4,217. At least one center told the authors of the paper that it paid $15,000. Many centers did not respond.

Mercantilización de las bodas

Plight your troth — and empty your father’s bank account.

By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, June 10, 2007; BW19

ONE PERFECT DAY

The Selling of the American Wedding

By Rebecca Mead

Penguin Press. 245 pp. $25.95
About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. “I’ll tell you what,” he said to her. “I’ll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life.” Without a moment’s hesitation, she astonished him — and me, too, when he told me the story — by replying, “I’ll take the wedding.”

This, mind you, was no “Bridezilla,” defined by Rebecca Mead as “a young woman who, upon becoming engaged, had been transformed from a person of reason and moderation into a self-absorbed monster, obsessed with her plans to stage the perfect wedding, an event of spectacular production values and flawless execution, with herself as the star of the show.” No, this was a young woman of reason and moderation, a sensible person who nonetheless had been caught up in an early wave of the phenomenon that — all unknown to her father and me — was beginning to sweep across America: the rise of the wedding industry, “shaped as much by commerce and marketing as it is by those influences couples might prefer to think of as affecting their nuptial choices, such as social propriety, religious observance, or familial expectation.”

El matrimonio en Estados Unidos

Marriage in America

The frayed knot
May 24th 2007 | MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
From The Economist print edition

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality

THE students at West Virginia University don’t want you to think they take life too seriously. It is the third-best “party school” in America, according to the Princeton Review’s annual ranking of such things, and comes a creditable fifth in the “lots of beer” category. Booze sometimes causes students’ clothes to fall off. Those who wake up garmentless after a hook-up endure the “walk of shame”, trudging back to their own dormitories in an obviously borrowed football shirt, stirring up gossip with every step.

And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don’t see how it’s a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.

A few blocks away, in a soup kitchen attached to a church, another 18-year-old balances a baby on her knee. Laura has a less planned approach to parenthood. “It just happened,” she says. The father and she were “never really together”, merely “friends with benefits, I guess”. He is now gone. “I didn’t want to put up with his stuff,” she says. “Drugs and stuff,” she adds, by way of explanation.

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

Búsqueda de sexo por internet

Sex and the internet

Devices and desires
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Is lascivious online content, traditionally on top, losing its lustre?

WHEN the internet took off in the 1990s, it was demonised as a steaming cauldron of porn. It has certainly made pornography more widely and easily available than ever before. The online porn industry is difficult to measure, but was valued at $1 billion in 2002 by America’s National Research Council. Google, which publishes its “zeitgeist” list of top search queries, redacts sex-related terms from the rankings for fear of causing offence. But the popularity of pornography is clear from figures compiled by companies that track user “clickstreams”. Last year about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature, according to Hitwise, a market-research firm. For comparison, search engines account for about 7% of site visits.

Yet the Hitwise data suggest that sex sites are now being dethroned. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October—the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see chart).

El negocio de la infertilidad

INFERTILIDAD: EL GRAN NEGOCIO
Cuando no se puede, siempre nos quedará la ciencia

por Paco Rego fotografías de Álvaro Villarrubia

Casi 800.000 parejas españolas, una de cada seis, tienen dificultades para concebir hijos. Muchas de ellas recurren a alguno de los 172 centros especializados de nuestro país. Sólo en 2006 han nacido 12.000 bebés por diferentes métodos de reproducción asistida. Mientras esta especialidad médica se ha transformado en un negocio –tener un niño en un centro privado puede costar hasta 25.000 euros–, expertos consultados por Magazine ofrecen sus consejos para que no fracase el método natural. Entre ellos, no obsesionarse, practicar algún deporte y «hacerlo» durante la ovulación en días alternos.

¿Son tóxicos los juguetes eróticos?

Dangerous Dildos, Part 1

In an unregulated industry, can sex toys be toxic?

by Tristan Taormino

February 2nd, 2007 4:33 PM

 

Many years ago, I did a photo shoot with porn star Chloe for Taboo magazine. It had been a long day of a hundred different poses and we were tired. “Let’s get that double dong and do an ass to ass shot,” said the photographer right before her assistant handed me a red two-headed rubber dildo fresh out of its package, with that shiny film on it that many jelly toys have. I spread lube on one end and began to slide the dildo into my ass, which was already warmed up from Chloe’s fingers. As the head slipped inside, my ass suddenly felt like it was on fire. A burning sensation spread throughout my butt, and when I looked up at Chloe, who was waiting for her end, she said, “I know that look. The toy must be old. Hot poker, right?” I yanked the fiery phallus out and jetted to the ladies room where I used an enema bottle filled with warm water to rinse out my butt. It didn’t do much good. I would later learn that the culprit was phthalates, a group of industrial chemicals with many uses, including, as I found out, being a pain in the ass.

Phthalates (the ph is silent) are added to polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to make it more pliable, so they are often found in soft plastic things, like toys made for small children, animals, and sexual pleasure. Vinyl sex toys containing the chemicals are among the most inexpensive and widely available on the market. But while their texture makes them ideal for insertables, it turns out that what makes them enjoyable may also make them toxic. Because phthalate-spiked PVC is not a stable inert compound, these toys continually leach phthalates, which can cause a nasty odor, a greasy film, and genital irritation (like the burning sensation in my ass?).

El negocio de la fertilización in vitro

Assisted conception

Buying babies, bit by bit

Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition

An international guide to baby-making

ONE of the tests of a liberal society is whether the state stays out of the bedroom—but more than 3m people alive now were not made in bedrooms. They came into being as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) under the glare of laboratory lights, with the assistance of a team of doctors, nurses and technicians.

IVF was originally intended to allow heterosexual couples to bypass problems with fallopian tubes or sperm by introducing eggs and sperm to each other in a petri dish. But demand has mushroomed among those with other medical problems as well as the single and gay. They need people to supply them with sperm, eggs and sometimes wombs; and the services of clinics who put the lot together.

Since the manufacturing of anything which is regarded as God-given—or at least natural—touches a moral nerve, governments tend to want to regulate the business. And because attitudes to the family vary from country to country, regulations about baby-making do too. Discerning baby-shoppers therefore assemble inputs from around the world—sperm from Denmark, an egg from Russia, a surrogate mother from California—to ensure that biology, for them, need not mean destiny. Some even switch countries midway through treatment, starting in Britain, say, and travelling to Russia, Spain or America at a crucial stage in the proceedings.

El matrimonio en el mundo

Do you take this man? No thanks

For many women the world over, marriage is no longer desirable or even necessary to fulfil their ambitions

Stephanie Coontz
Sunday December 31, 2006

Observer

There is a belief in Britain and America that recent changes in marriage and family life are peculiar to the affluent, secular West and that we could reverse the decline by re-emphasising the value of marriage. Yet the problem today is not lack of respect for marriage. In fact, marriage as a relationship between two individuals comes with a greater sense of personal obligation than ever, although marriage as an institution no longer organises social life the way it used to. And it will never do so again.

The world is experiencing a revolution in marriage and family life as big, challenging, and, ultimately, unstoppable as the globalisation of the economy.

Two trends have spearheaded this revolution in marriage and family life: societies’ decreasing ability to dictate personal choices and women’s growing ability to support themselves. Paradoxically, many of the things that have made marriage more optional and more fragile are inextricably connected to the things we cherish most about modern marriage - its emphasis on love, mutual respect and personal choice.

El comercio mundial de juguetes sexuales

Weekend Edition
December 2 / 3, 2006

The Global Trade in Sex Toys

Made in China

By DAVID ROSEN

China provides two critical services to the United States. It is a major underwriter of U.S. debt and it is our major supplier of sex toys. According to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, at the end of 2005, China had $820 billion in U.S. Treasury assets, the second-largest holder of U.S. debt after Japan. The Shanghai Star estimated that China, in 2004, accounted for 70 percent of global sex products — one can only imagine that its share of the U.S. market is about the same. These two phenomena illustrate how sex is becoming increasingly integrated into the world market economy.

The U.S. porn industry is estimated to be a $10 billion business. Porn merchants sell their wares to home consumers in many forms, including magazines and books, DVDs, cable and satellite television programs (through Comcast and Rupert Murdock’s DirecTV), telephone and web services; they also reach weary travelers through pay-per-view services at nearly all the nation’s hotel chains through Lodgenet and OnCommand. Even Virgin Megastore has gotten into the act, opening X-rated nooks in some of its hipper stores.

Condones y política de empleo

October 29, 2006

U.S. Jobs Shape Condoms’ Role in Foreign Aid

By CELIA W. DUGGER

EUFAULA, Alabama — Here in this courtly, antebellum town, Alabama’s condom production has survived an onslaught of Asian competition, thanks to the patronage of straitlaced congressmen from this Bible Belt state.

Behind the scenes, the politicians have ensured that companies in Alabama won federal contracts to make billions of condoms over the years for AIDS prevention and family planning programs overseas, though Asian factories could do the job at less than half the cost.

In recent years, the state’s condom manufacturers fell hundreds of millions of condoms behind on orders, and the federal aid agency began buying them from Asia. The use of Asian-made condoms has contributed to layoffs that are coming next month.

But Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, has quietly pressed to maintain the unqualified priority for American-made condoms and is likely to prevail if the past is any guide.

“What’s wrong with helping the American worker at the same time we are helping people around the world?” asked the senator’s spokesman, Michael Brumas.

That question goes to the heart of an intensifying debate among wealthy nations about to what degree foreign aid is about saving jobs at home or lives abroad.

Britain, Ireland and Norway have all sought to make aid more cost effective by opening contracts in their programs to fight global poverty to international competition. The United States, meanwhile, continues to restrict bidding on billions of dollars worth of business to companies operating in America, and not just those that make condoms.