"At the top of the pay scale, technology is delivering on its promise. Workers can increase their..."

“At the top of the pay scale, technology is delivering on its promise. Workers can increase their hours and their output from home and even work second jobs with more ease than ever. But toward the bottom, anxiety lingers, and the Web enables some people to take risks they never would have imagined. In this way, the women of Gilgo Beach still have something to teach us. The Internet might have made pimps less necessary, but today’s escorts are as marginalized as ever, and every bit as vulnerable. The police rarely help them when they are at risk, and they rarely take their disappearances seriously. As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate.”

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The New Prostitutes - NYTimes.com

Nothing that Bob Kolker says in this piece is outright wrong, and I think he is generally smart. But I still feel kinda mad about it, and it still feels off putting. 

Why? Because we sex workers have been saying the things said in this piece, and the study it cites, for years. We have been delivering this kind of thoughtful analysis, its on the internet and public. But Kolker is a journalist, he has access to the New York Times, he is an editor at New York. So he’s “legit" (is that synonmous with “unbiased"?) in ways that sex workers, even the privileged among us, can’t be.