In an attempt to further ruin any hope of my having a good name on e2, I've decided to share this little bit of
trivia picked up from my stripper friends. Even though one might expect that
prostitutes make more money than
strippers because what they do is ... how should I put this ... potentially much more
disgusting than a
lap dance could ever be, this turns out not to be the case.
I only caught on to this line of inquiry when a friend of mine who strips mentioned how little money she had, but said no jobs in town paid better than the one she already had. I jokingly suggested that she consider prostitution, which elicited a giggle from both herself and her boyfriend. She then said something to the effect of "Actually, some of the girls I work with used to do that, but they made way less money than they do at the club." I was incredulous, since it seemed like sex would almost have to bring in more money than simple teasing. However, after talking with her about her nightly earnings and what her co-workers had to say about prostitution, I began to see she was right.
Here's why:
In my area, a lap dance costs between $5 and $20. For the purposes of this example, we're going to say that $10 is the magic number, because that's what my friend made. Now, lap dances last the length of a song, about four minutes, and on a busy night a dancer can expect to be requested for ten or more dances an hour. To keep things fair, we'll average in the slow nights too, and call it 7 dances per hour. Typically the clubs around here close at one am to keep the cops happy, and shifts start at five, so the shift is 8 hours long. Let's do the math: $10 * 7 d/hr * 8 hr = $560, a pretty solid pile of Benjamins for eight hours work. We'll guess that the dancer decides to tip out 10% to the club's bouncers, leaving her with $560 - $56 = $504 on an average night. Nice.
Okay, the numbers are going to be a little sketchier for the out-call prostitute, since I've had to glean them from online references instead of a primary source. For my area, the running price for full service (which means exactly what it sounds like) is about $150. Now, I'm going to guess these ladies work reasonable seven or eight hour shifts, but need an hour or so of clean-up and travel time between clients. That gives us .5 clients per hour, or four clients per night, which seems like a nice brisk trade. Multiplied together, we get $150 * .5 cli/hr * 8 hr = $600. Of course, we can't neglect the escort service these girls work for, which probably lops a massive $50 right off the top of each client's payment. This step, finally, leaves us with the prostitute's earnings, $600 - $200 = $400 per night. Evidently even high class escort prostitutes make less than plain vanilla exotic dancers.
Just for fun, we'll compare these two salaries to what an inner-city street-walking prostitute might expect to make. I warn that this is almost completely conjecture, since the site referenced below had much, much more information about prices of escort style prostitutes than streetwalkers. We'll assume the average price for a half hour of "service" is $45, averaging between all the (ahem) kinds of service offered. Let's also assume an 8 hour shift, for convenience's sake. So, we've got $45 * 2 cli/hr * 8 hours = $720, which seems like quite a lot. Unfortunately, we've left the pimp out of the picture, which he wouldn't like one little bit! Once his 70% cut -- and that's a low estimate -- is figured in, it leaves the poor girl with a paltry $146 a night, by far the least of the lot.
refs:
http://www.mensclubguide.com/clubreview.asp?flag=reviews
http://www.smutland.com/guest/prostitution/ - broken, as of 2002:08:05