Hearne: The Dumbing Down of Sex in Kansas City

Leave it to the Kansas City Star to find a way to make sex uninteresting…

Seriously. Not that a study called The Hustle about the “economics of the underground commercial sex industry” was meant to titillate, still did anybody else try choking down the newspaper’s sum up of the story?

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

Geez, they couldn’t even find a way to localize the several city study enough so people here could make it maybe halfway through the article?

What the heck, I’ll take a whack at it.

“Outside the sex sold legally in Nevada, prostitution in the United States transpires in the shadows of an underground economy,” the study states. “There are no accounting records to trace, no receipts to scrutinize, and no legal records to analyze. Simply, it is difficult to grasp the size of this economy.”

Not exactly an earth shattering premise, but let’s read on.

“But a groundbreaking study released by the Urban Institute sheds new light on how much money is generated by the underground commercial sex economy in American cities.”

Sounds promising, but I don’t recall reading a single thing about Kansas City’s digits in the Star story. In fact, we barely get a couple of vague mentions.

But why? Clearly there were a few nuggets worth reporting specific to the Cowtown.

Like the fact that the pimps here make by far the least amount of money of the pimps in any of the seven cities studied, a paltry $5,000 a week.

Sheesh, our pimps are hurting.

Especially when compared to other cities in the the study’s “stacks of cash” chart. For example, the second lowest pimp pay in San Diego was more than double ours at $11,129. Denver’s pimps take down $31,200 a week (a mile high compared to us) and Atlanta’s topped the chart at $32,833.

Not surprisingly, generally speaking the pimps take all the “girls” money, but buy them whatever they want within reason. All while prescribing quotas ($400 to $1,000 a day) and offering incentive packages.

Geez, sounds like the insurance racket

One source said women “were not allowed to date black dudes 25 and under.” The only dating allowed is with dudes 50 and up.

Uh, Craig?

Which brings us to the all-important pricing category.

You know, the cost of having sex. Beginning with a range of from $15 to $1,000 a throw, again Kansas City came in towards the low end with what looks like about 15 bucks for 15 minutes (15 minutes?) and a bit more – maybe $20 or $25 for half an hour and what looks like around 50 bone for a full hour.

Almost embarrassingly KC didn’t even make the chart at $100 & up.

Did you know pimps have business expenses? Course they do.

The largest by percentage being their rides (wheels) at 65.8 percent, followed closely by housing and “clothing and appearance for women,” with drugs and alcohol way down the list. And weapons at the very bottom at only 2.7 percent. Meaning I guess there are few Republicans in the pimp trade. Makes perfect sense.

It should come as little surprise that digital marketing is the wave of the present and future…you know, in the sex trade.

Now a bit of bad news for our friends at The Pitch:

“Old-school marketing methods—ads in the phone book, local newspapers, alternative lifestyle publications, and business cards—are still in use, but they are ceding more and more ground to online mediums.”

The study’s bottom line:

“The underground commercial sex economy is still unsettlingly murky, but by shining more light on it we can help more victims to escape the shadows.”

That’s all, folks!