When review forums first emerged, the talk was over how dissatisfied so many hobbyists were with sessions. Out of 10 sessions, you might get two or three that went well. This was largely due to miscommunication and poor expectation setting on the part of both hobbyists and providers. After all, a small space ad in the back of a newsweekly couldn’t legally communicate services or the type of session one could expect. And no one has ever been comfortable discussing the details of a session over the phone.

By sharing our experiences, we were able to improve the stats. Instead of walking into a situation blind, we walked in with some knowledge. This was a complete revelation, adding a level of transparency that had never existed in the hobby, unless you dared to share your secrets with other like-minded men, which was rare.

I can’t really imagine a situation in which review sites will disappear. Groups of like-minded hobbyists will back-channel and information because it’s very much in their interest to do so. The supposition that clients have nothing to lose by having their identities publicly revealed is naive. We have families and business reputations that can be ruined, at the very least—the financial and emotional cost can be high. I’m not trying to equate this with a violent rape in the least. But let’s be clear that both ends of this business have something valuable at stake.

I haven’t written a review in years simply because so many reviews I read are useless. They exaggerate, they lie, they embellish—they’re simply not reliable. However, when I did write reviews regularly, there was a certain excitement about rehashing the details and sharing them anonymously with others. It became part of the overall hobbying experience—part of the entertainment.

These days, I guard my identity very closely. I never give out my handles from the review/forum sites, change my hobbying email frequently, as well as my burner phone (and phone number). Otherwise, I’ve been told many times that I’m an easy client. I’m just a very careful consumer.

Were the pictures/information about appearance given by the provider a) accurate b) somewhat inaccurate c) very inaccurate?

Were you a) very pleased b) somewhat pleased c) not pleased by your date?

I personally am a very boring customer, so it’s hard for me to be fair to those seeking or wanting to market “kinks”. Maybe a reasonable way of handling this would be for reviewers to be allowed to create a screened profile listing their preferences. For example “I like to be anally penetrated with a dildo”. But “I would not be pleased at all unless …” would be screened out. Otherwise, any rating of “pleased” would be evidence for an accusation of prostitution.

The word is “discreet”, not “discrete”.

It’s only necessary for you to sign up with P411 or Date-Check to prove YOUR identity to a provider. The benefit in you joining lies solely in you being able to keep some of your personal information like work info between you and the staff who pre-screens you, and not have to risk telling each new provider all that info.

It is absolutely NOT necessary to join P411 and Date-Check to verify that a provider is “safe”. Most provider profiles on both sites are publicly viewable by anyone. And the very fact that a provider is ON those sites to begin with means she’s already been vetted by the staff and found to NOT be LE. If she’s on the site AT ALL, she’s “safe” (legally speaking at least).

If a provider has been on any website like that for any length of time (my ad posts have “member since 2009” on them, and my P411 and Date-Check profiles have history, possibly even historical Google or wayback machine cached versions, as well as many mutual “okays”), it’s a given she cares about the quality of her services rendered, too. Long term providers don’t get to that point by leaving a trail littered with clients they went out of their way to intentionally piss off behind them.

But my observation through the years is that the average client wants to justify seeing the fly by night sketchy looking new on the scene and possibly underage providers with little to no organized information (“thinking” only with the little head) but while feigning interest in a methodical, intelligent method of rationally looking at long term, proven providers. I’m not talking about the difference between 18 year olds and grandmothers but providers having obvious experience in the business, something a twenty something with a head on her shoulders is perfectly capable of (but then her sense of self becomes a turn off to the guys who, by and large on the “boards”, want to prey on the weak and coercible). Within literally seconds of a newbie showing up, there’s a stampede. Then anyone who gets understandably “ripped off” or in trouble by the traveling huckster who rolls out of town as quickly as they rolled in parlays the disappointment that they generated by their own obviously stupid choices into a justification for “review sites”. Too bad they’re a day late and a dollar short, and the young girl who will change her name and contact info and fake pics dozens more times has already flown the coop. And the providers who were always there doing a good job to begin with are left with the fallout of other people’s lunacy, as their privacy is chipped away at through zero fault of their own.

Stay away from “too good to be true”s and here today/gone tomorrow providers (especially the ones who come across in their pics as self-absorbed teenage narcissists with ADHD), and chances are you won’t have any worries about getting “ripped off”. Common sense goes a long way.

I’ve had providers ask me to leave certain details of our encounters out, or to mention certain things, and I always respect their wishes. I tend to keep the details of my reviews minimal – I used to feel guilty for that, like I was doing something wrong. Now, in retrospect, I’m glad I was discrete.

So what’s the recommended system? Should I sign up for P411? How do I find providers in my area, beyond the local review site? I don’t want to try my luck on backpage.com and hope for the best…

If I were a prospective client, I think I might like a well-designed, well-moderated review site with enough structure so that it doesn’t decay into commodifying “Reviews”-cum-Blackmail-Attempts, but which did provide a sense of security for someone venturing into a new neighborhood, or a desire to try a new (and perhaps vaguely threatening or potentially embarrassing) type of service.

Bear with me for a moment when I suggest that you glance at ratemyprofessor.com, which is a site for college students to warn their classmates off of crappy professors, or to praise good ones. The site is moderated, posters are responsible for what they say, the professor who is critiqued is encouraged to respond to unfair criticism, and there is sufficient structure (e.g. certain questions are asked and answered in every review) so that the posts don’t devolve into tale-telling self-aggrandizing bullshit. I know it’s faintly comical for me to suggest that a group of sex-working professionals model a website after a college-kids’ playground, but I am really just suggesting that you examine the structure to generate ideas and discussion.

Zagat Restaurant Reviews started as a mimeographed (!) sheet that was mailed to 20 or 30 people, and now is worldwide and owned by Google. How did that happen? It was reliable, intelligent, and useful. It directed people to really nice restaurants that they might otherwise never have heard of, and warned them off the crappy overrated ones. If an ambitious group of sex workers designs a site that performs a similarly reliable service that remains under their own control so that it doesn’t become yet another oppressive and controlling entity, my feeling is that if you build it, they will come.