Bloomberg has a story proposing the health of global trade can be judged by extramarital affairs, and Latvian hookers. Why Latvian? Two websites, one that caters to British traders having affairs, and another that offers the services of Latvian prostitutes, compared their traffic patterns with market activity. Apparently traffic was way up in two circumstances: markets booms and collapses. Analysts say this has something to do with "animal spritis" pushing the market in extreme directions. When people are over- confident, or despondent, they buy or sell in bulk, and they also stray from their usual bedding habits.

Lesson: Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be traders.

Tags: economic indicators, latvian prostitutes

A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:

There's something a little different about the State Department's most recent annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released Tuesday. Under former Secretary Rice, the reports’ introductions cast the U.S. as a crusader against the evils of human trafficking. "President George W. Bush has committed the United States Government to lead in combating this serious 21st century challenge," she wrote in 2007. But Secretary Clinton admits that America has its own “struggle with modern day slavery.” Indeed, on the same day that the report was released, an Atlanta-based coalition was at the Georgia Capitol, arguing that we have to pay attention to “what's happening under our own noses with our own children." In Georgia and throughout the U.S., runaway children are routinely reeled in by people who pose as friends but quickly reveal themselves as pimps, the group argues. Internet recruiters look for vulnerable kids online and entice them to join prostitution rings.

In Georgia alone, 200 to 300 girls are pimped out to adult men every month. The Atlanta group is fighting to change a law that allows minors who have been forced into prostitution to be treated like criminals. Now, a 15-year-old girl who had been forced into prostitution could be arrested as a criminal rather than being referred to a social services organization. Victims' advocates say that if the law is changed, law enforcement officers will be able to arrest the pimps and johns who are exploiting children and take the girls to a place that can offer shelter and support.

Tags: human trafficking

The nomenclature surrounding the selling of sex acts is notoriously awkward. Is he/she a prostitute? Hooker? “Sex worker” seems to do the trick, but there is perhaps a whiff of condescension in this kind of politely clinical nonprofit-speak. The always-interesting Melissa Gira Grant here introduces us to new terminology recently encountered at a panel discussion among self-described “male feminists." A panelist told her his organization doesn't like the term "sex worker." They much prefer "women used by prostitution." Because you know what really empowers women? Exclusive use of the passive voice.

“Having men tell me how powerless I am,” fumes Grant, “is why I turned to a life of contracting with them the specific terms under which I could give them attention, and also under which I would ask them to treat me. ... How wonderful, a voiceless mass of women to invoke as your beneficiaries. How awful, when any of us do show up.”

Check out the whole post, if only for the innervating powers of a feminist rant on a weekday morning.

Tags: Melissa Gira Grant, prostitution, sex work, sex-positive feminism

Last week, a 19-year-old New Zealand student, known only as Unigirl, sold her virginity to a stranger for $32,000. Her online ad was viewed by 30,000 people and received over 1,200 offers. Thanks to the Internet, women like Unigirl are putting their sexual initiation up for sale in the very public marketplace. Though these auctions have a new global reach, the pricing of virginity is an ancient human practice—according to the book of Deuteronomy, a girl’s virginity is worth 50 shekels, paid to her father. In today’s economy, how much is a woman’s virginity worth?

At least $10,000 if the woman is reasonably attractive and under 25. The exact price ultimately depends on the “quality” of the virginity: how young and hot the virgin is. Models can fetch over $1 million. In 2005, Peruvian model Graciela Yataco was the first to break this threshold, although she eventually declined her top bid of $1.3 million. In January 2009, 20-year-old Italian model Raffaella Fico received an offer of nearly $1.5 million, but also allegedly retracted the auction. She is now dating a professional soccer player.

Branding is also crucial. According to Gawker, current co-eds have the priciest hymens, as “college girls are simultaneously Girls Gone Wild and nubile pillow-fighting naifs.” To maximize gains, a woman should also disclose her identity, preferably with revealing pictures and a detailed sexual history. The most successful for-sale virgins package themselves as pure and virtuous virgin/whores. Yataco was a devout Catholic who needed money to care for her sick mother. Fico was also religious and planned to use the profits from her sexual foray for acting classes once she bought a house in Rome.

Selling your virginity to pay school fees is also a good way to seduce buyers. The narrative of self-sacrifice is ready-made for the media, and this good publicity inflates demand. In 2007, 18-year-old Carys Copestake from Manchester managed to make $23,000 to finance her physics degree, even though the only physical information she provided was, “brunette, 34C, green eyes, all in proportion and good looking."

Natalie Dylan is the ultimate virginity-marketing mogul. A 22-year-old women’s studies graduate from Sacramento State, Dylan needed the money to pay for her master’s degree in family and marriage therapy. She announced the auction on Howard Stern’s radio show in September 2008 and justified her decision in the Daily Beast and on The Tyra Banks Show. After her media blitz, Dylan received over 10,000 bids, half of which were for over $1 million.

Dylan approached her virginity like a good capitalist. “The value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me,” she said to Tyra. “I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men.”

Tags: prostitution, sex, virginity

The National Review Online has an article this week in which an unidentified psychologist (she writes anonymously) blames porn for the breakdown of her marriage. I’ve never had much affinity for the strange-bedfellows partnership that porn inspires between hand-wringing conservative traditionalists and outraged women-are-objectified feminists.  And this article did nothing to change my mind.

The author starts off by hyperbolically calling porn a “narcotic so insidious that it evades serious scientific study and legislative action for decades” and then goes on to … cite a passel of “serious scientific studies.” But, as Dr. Helen Smith (aka the InstaWife) points out, she ignored others that dispute the idea that porn is “ravaging American families.”

“Anonymous” writes:  “Perhaps the greatest hardship for women who fear they have lost (or are losing) a husband to Internet porn is the absence of a public consensus about the harmful effects of pornography on marriage.” That’s your greatest hardship? It’s not having to support two households on the same income that used to support one, or dealing with how the fallout from your divorce has affected your five kids? It’s that not everyone agrees with you that porn wrecked your marriage? That tells me that this author is trying to project the problems within her own marriage onto society as a whole, which is silly.

I don’t doubt that porn can be indicative of a troubled marriage. But it’s a symptom as much as it’s a cause. If one person in a marriage is watching porn and the other disapproves, it’s a problem of having different ideals, or a problem with communication, or lack of respect for your partner’s feelings.

Watching Sideways isn’t going to turn a sober person into an alcoholic, and watching a McDonald’s commercial isn’t going to make a person fat. Porn by itself is not going to wreck a healthy marriage.

Photograph of sign by Cherry, under the terms of a GNU Free Documentation Licesnse.

Tags: marital problems, pornography, psychology