A Review Primer

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May 27, 2013

Screenshot of review on Punter.net, the main escort review site for the U.K.

The following is a quick guide to review practices and terminology across different fields and even countries, compiled by Tits and Sass editors and contributors including Jemima, Lori Adorable, and others.

Escort Reviews in the US: Though there are several popular American venues for reviews, one site in particular (The Erotic Review, better known as TER) has established clear dominance in visibility and popularity. Its insistence upon assigning numbers to a provider’s appearance and the customer’s overall experience have led to lists of highest “ranked” escorts across the country and within each major city. Many escorts advertise with this information (“Ranked in the TOP TEN of escorts nationwide”) while even more advertise with encouragements to “check out my reviews.” Because reviews are such a large part of escort marketing in both urban and exurban areas of the States, escorts may solicit write-ups from clients, write their own positive ones under a fake account, incentivize good reviews with discounts, or even pay someone to praise them in review form. (Review writers for hire will often spam escort email accounts with their own rates.) Despite claims to the contrary, there is no fact-checking that goes into approving submitted reviews, and so false reviews are published with some regularity, both those portraying the escort positively and those attacking her as ugly, unpleasant, or dirty. There is no review board that prioritizes escort and client concerns equally; all are skewed to favor the client and escorts are often ignored or penalized for speaking out against rude customer attitudes, dangerous practices, or retaliatory reviews.

Though academics and civilian observers regularly treat reviews as an indoor work phenomenon, reviews are not limited to women advertising online or using indoor work spaces. For over a decade, men have traded review-type information online about street workers as well, even when they don’t know the woman’s name or regular location.

In Canada: Escort review sites are common in Canada, though it is possible to go through your entire career without using them. In big cities like Toronto, a hub for business travelers, using review boards to find an independent or agency escort is more common than in other parts of the country and many escorts use them as a marketing tool. In Ottawa, the capital, recommendation boards are also common, possibly because of the perceived privacy concerns of those involved in politics. In Vancouver and Calgary, smaller and less central cities, the boards contain a tight-knit community of reviewers and hobbyists, but men who travel there don’t seem to rely on reviews as heavily to find an escort.

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Kat’s Paycation Guide

By

Kat

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July 25, 2012

Strip tripping can be fun and lucrative, or you can come back with less money and an ego so bruised that you’ll change the subject whenever anyone asks about that trip that you wouldn’t shut up about before you left. There was the time that I went to Indianapolis during the Indy 500 because a lonely juggalette stripper on the Internet told me I’d make like ten thousand dollars, minimum. And then there was the time that I just showed up in Hawaii and had to eat Burger King and Subway for a week. I would like to think that I know what I’m doing by now, and since I’m not nice enough to tell you where the money’s good, I’ll at least share tips that have made my life easier. This list is inspired by badass seasoned road stripper Story’s advice, so please look at it first.

Through Being Cool: If Vegas is on your stripper bucket list, or you can’t stop looking at everyone’s Guam Facebook pics, then I won’t stop you from going to the popular stripping destinations. But I think you’re going to have more luck at the club in the middle of nowhere that you’ve never heard of. You know why you’ve never heard of it? Because strippers keep the best places to themselves. Get rustic. Is the customer riding a horse around the parking lot not a big deal? Do the dancers pee in the dressing room trashcan? Go there.

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Escort Evolution: 5 Classic Hooker Attitudes

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Charlotte Shane

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May 20, 2013

Sex workers are a profoundly diverse group of individuals, with wildly different backgrounds, circumstances, and work tactics. But I’ve been around the block enough times to know that within this corner of our lives, our experiences often coincide. On a near-daily basis, I recognize another escort displaying the signs of an attitude I too once held. So without further ado, here are five common hooker states of mind that I suspect most of you will recognize, in others if not in yourself.

Everyone Must Know — The most embarrassing, cringe-inducing mindset is also one of the earliest to appear among a subset of privileged, politicized, very young sex workers. Think about the worst qualities of most middle class college kids: their naiveté, which they’re (naively) convinced is actually a very sophisticated and hard-earned understanding of the world; their youthful earnestness; their awkward, hyper-self aware social skills or lack thereof. Throw in a job at the local strip club/jack shack/full service incall and it’s a recipe for humiliating disaster. I was convinced that I could single handedly eliminate at least, like, 50% of the stigma around sex work by making it clear that I — a white, educated, intelligent young woman! — was selling sexual services and was TOTALLY EMOTIONALLY FINE and THRIVING and indeed, STILL WHITE AND EDUCATED in spite of it.

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Exposing Snapchat: What Adult Performers Need To Know

By

Victoria Joy

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June 11, 2014

I live a double life. By day, I am a software developer, living in a world where your choice of hoodie, afternoon beer, and text editor mark your rank within the social tribe. At night, my mousy ponytail comes down and the Givenchy Rouge goes on as I fire up my snowball microphone and HD webcam. No doubt, I’m probably getting naked for guys whose open source code I use day to day in my projects. I’m a tech geek and proud cam model. That’s why last month’s Federal Trade Commission ruling that the popular photo sharing mobile app Snapchat deceived its users has me fuming.

The story of Snapchat reads like the typical Silicon Valley tech bromance novel. Founded by Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel when they were students at Stanford and living in the school’s Kappa Sigma fraternity house, the early years of Snapchat are chronicled in Forbes. They were frat-bro misogynists with little regard for the women of Stanford, illustrated by some emails obtained by Valleywag that Spiegel sent to his Kappa Sigma brothers which included the term “sororisluts.”

Snapchat’s main value proposition is that the app allows users to send mobile photos that are secure and which are deleted from the recipient’s phone after one viewing. However, the FTC found that the app is not secure at all. The FTC’s ruling details that the company failed to communicate security holes to users. These security holes include a hacker security breach, a recipient’s ability to take a screenshot of a photo without notifying the sender, and the fact that images were not deleted after a recipient opened them. According to a press release from the FTC, “Snapchat deceptively told its users that the sender would be notified if a recipient took a screenshot of a snap. In fact, any recipient with an Apple device that has an operating system pre-dating iOS 7 can use a simple method to evade the app’s screenshot detection, and the app will not notify the sender.” The FTC also found that Snapchat “tracked and transmitted some users’ location information and collected data from their address books without consent.” Although many users who trusted Snapchat with their private photos were surprised to learn about the FTC’s findings, the history of the company points to a disregard for user security almost from the start.

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Stripper Music Monday: 2001 And A Dying Format

By

Bubbles

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January 23, 2012

Someone hit my car in a parking lot (he left a note), so it’s been in the shop for a week. The dealer’s loaner is lacking, stereo-wise; there’s no SiriusXM and not even an AUX input plug. After three whole days of thinking “broadcast radio is not cutting it,” I realized that even without being able to plug in my iPhone, there was a way to listen to music in this car. On CD. That means that somehow the old, hard-copy method of listening to music in cars did not register for a full 72 hours.

Strip club music plays from a computer now, unless you’re in a little bar with a jukebox or a stereo with an iPod jack (hello, Portland). If the club allows dancers any control over the music, the DJ will either download requests or rip them from iPods/phones/flash drives. So it’s rare now to see a dancer bring CDs to work. Until relatively recently the ones with a particular interest in what they danced to while on stage would regularly haul their CD cases up to the DJ booth every shift, though.

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