Six months after a sex scandal ousted Eliot Spitzer from office, the New York governor turned “lov gov” is working in real estate, still with his wife Silda, and wondering how it all went so wrong. Meanwhile, call girls are back in the spotlight—and working harder than ever as Wall Street takes another tumble. 

According to Columbia researcher and call girl expert Sudhir Venkatesh, working girls may benefit from the nation’s latest financial troubles. Venkatesh has been studying sex workers for nearly two decades; for the last ten years, he’s been keeping tabs on prostitutes in Chicago and New York, who work at both the high and the low end of the sex-for-money pay scale. While you’d think it’d be hard times for sex workers, not so for women who work at the top of the sex trade. As Venkatesh reports: “One thing I’ve learned is that economic downturns can be boom times for high-end sex workers.” Previously, he’s found, during times of economic downturns, men seek out sex workers more often. As it turns out, men may be more prone to turn to call girls for “theraputic” reasons when times are tough. “As Jean, a New Yorker and a 35-year-old former paralegal turned ‘corporate escort’ (her description) told me, ‘I had about two dozen men who started doubling their visits with me. They couldn’t face their wives, who were bitching about the fact they lost income. Men want to be men. All I did was make them feel like they could go back out there with their head up.’” In fact, Venkatesh says 40-percent of client-sex worker transactions don’t involve sex at all. For many men, money is tied up with their self-esteem, and working girls who know how to boost the—ah—morale of their client base may do very well, indeed, as stocks plummet.