Love & Sex Magazine

Perfectly Ordinary

By Maggiemcneill @Maggie_McNeill

I’m a journalist preparing a report about the increasing use of AirBNB by prostitutes.  Do you know if this is something common ?
AirBnB logo
I’m not sure why people are surprised that sex workers use AirBnB.  See, sex workers are people, so any time something becomes more common for people in general, you can bet it will also become more common for sex workers.  As smartphones became more popular, they also became more popular for whores.  As Uber became more popular, we used it more, too.  And since AirBnB has become increasingly popular, Surprise! We’re using it more as well.  I don’t see any stories headlined “Medical Professionals Increasingly Use Computers for Research”, or “Small Businesses Turn To Square for Credit Card Processing”, but for some reason when perfectly ordinary sex workers (and yeah, we’re pretty ordinary; there’s no city in the world where we can’t be found) use a perfectly ordinary technology or product, it becomes a story.  If sex workers are using AirBnB to a disproportionate degree than other people who rent hotel rooms (and that’s a mighty big “if”), it’s probably because cops and other professional busybodies are lying to hotel owners, managers and employees about imaginary “sex trafficking” in an effort to get them to spy on sex workers and report them to said cops, so the cops can then arrest the workers, steal everything they own as “proceeds of crime” and then plaster their names and faces all over the news.  If you want a real story instead of a ridiculous excuse to titillate the bourgeois, try investigating how the War on Whores is becoming the replacement for the increasingly-unpopular War on Drugs.

(Have a question of your own?  Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)


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