If times were tough—I mean, really tough—would you sell your body for money? In her Salon column “Pinched,” Tracy Clark-Flory reports that more women are entering the sex industry due the recession, including Marie, a 30-year-old former white-collar professional with a degree, who now operates out of hotel room and has “been paid more times than she can count, or cares to count, for sex, blow jobs, hand jobs and sensual massage.”

We already knew that sex still sells during a recession—sex toy sales are up, lingerie sales are booming, and sex workers—from prostitutes to strippers—aren’t being as adversely effected by the economic downturn as other businesses. But otherwise professional women who never considered a career in sex work suddenly taking it all off to make ends meet? Is this really a trend?

In Nevada, land of legal prostitution, there are currently 25 legal sex houses—and all of them are staffed by women to serve men. But what happens in Vegas, may now be happening for the ladies! According to a report from the Nevada Brothel Association, a number of their fine establishments are looking to add some studs to their employee rosters. If there was ever a reason for feminism, it’s got to be this chance to even the score. Why should men get to be the only ones who can buy themselves some sexy time?

This weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine had a lengthy feature on SeekingArrangements.com, an online dating site which matches affluent men (or at least men willing to shill out what money they have) with women who are willing to trade companionship and often sex in exchange for money, gifts, and other perks. Half of these sugar daddies are married, while the vast majority of the sugar babies are in their ‘20s. The best news of all for these guys? Sugar babies outnumber sugar daddies 10 to 1. Brandon Wade, Seeking Arrangement’s 38-year-old founder and chief executive, says, “We stress that these relationships are mutually beneficial. We ask people to really think about what they want in a relationship and what they have to offer. That kind of upfront honesty is a good basis for any relationship.”

Leanne Eisen is a Toronto-based artist who creates dollhouse scenes that depict the human condition. One of her most intriguing photo-based series is “Play,” for which Eisen built miniature replicas of brothel interiors. While most dollhouses contain scenes of perfect domesticity, Eisen’s rooms allow viewers a downsized peek inside the mostly hidden world of prostitution. I asked the artist about her mini-sex work project; her response is after the jump. 

You can take our dignity but not our porn! New York’s Governor Paterson is pitching new taxes to help the state’s $14 billion budget deficit. Among them: a $10 tax for strip club patrons and tax on Internet downloads for web porn. Similarly, Texas pols want to place a $5 “pole tax” which was struck down as unconstitutional by a state judge. Oh yeah, the forgotten “right to bare boobs.” Most of these skin taxes have stalled because of conflicts with the First Amendment. No porno, no peace! After the jump, other laws striving to cash in on sex…

Tracy Quan at The Daily Beast poses the question in her column this week, as Spitzer’s “matchmaker,” Kristen Davis, releases a memoir, called The Manhattan Madam, about running America’s “most successful” prostitution ring. In the book she allegedly dishes about some of her famous clients—but should she just keep her mouth shut?

The Sheriff of Cook County is suing Craiglist. Chicagoan Tom Dart claims the site cost his department $100,000 in prostitution prosecution in 2008. Monitoring the erotic services section of the site alone has yielded big busts, including a ring of four men who were pimping girls as young as fifteen! In fact, in June 2008 they arrested 76 people involved in illegal sexual activities. Dart says he could chase working girls on the website all day, but instead, he’s going after the webmasters, or as he puts it, “I’m trying to go up the ladder.” 

Pimpin’ ain’t easy, especially when you’re a prostitute yourself. Phoenix police have arrested two 16-year-old girls for allegedly pimping other young women for prostitution. The teens, identified as Jazmine Finley and Tatiana Tye, were involved in prostitution themselves and were responsible for recruiting, teaching, and receiving money from at least five girls, ages 14 to 17. Although some of the girls were from area high schools, no prostitution crimes were committed on school grounds while the Phoenix Police Vice Unit was investigating. The investigation is ongoing, and there may be more arrests. I’m pretty sure Finley and Tye didn’t hatch this plan on their own, and were probably coerced into prostitution in a similar fashion. I’d bet the whole group is probably part of a larger prostitution ring—let’s hope the investigation goes all the way to the top. [Daily News]

As the economy goes soft, some women are seeking to earn extra cash as freelance sex workers. As it turns out, there’s a market for powerful career gals who can dominate a man’s world—literally. According to Tracy Quan’s “Kinkonomics,” recently laid off ladies are freelancing as professional dominatrixes. Although sex workers generally consider pro-domme work the most difficult sex work, these well-educated, middle-class working girls have decided to try their hand at the kinky version of the world’s oldest profession. It’s another type of economic stimulus package; this one includes bondage, verbal humiliation, and foot worship. [The Daily Beast]

Last year marked a confluence of events both real (Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupre) and thinly fictionalized (Showtime’s “Secret Diary of A Call Girl”), that arguably made 2008 the Year of the Prostitute. A cache of articles glamorizing the oldest profession in recent months, combined with the economic tailspin, has put a question you might once have asked yourself in your darkest hour firmly at the fore: Would you sell your ass for money? Sure, the prospect of exchanging your goodies (and we’re not just talking sex, but any sort of sexual activity) for goods still carries stigma, and the feminist positions for and against are as numerous and complicated as the positions in the Kama Sutra. But the more attention the topic gets on the national stage, the less it stays a dirty little secret. Two women’s takes on the matter, after the jump…

A columnist for the Guardian thinks wedlock is a nothing more than a “legalised prostitution trap cum labour exploitation racket” and any woman who gets excited about her big wedding day as she painstakingly plans every last detail is just deluding herself from the ambivalence she clearly must feel about entering into such a horrible union. Behind the façade of excitement, she argues, women are really just “dubious” about marriage, which “is revealed by their desire to constantly reinforce a sense of the fated immaculacy of the day. The obsession over creating a perfect wedding is actually worry, fear, uncertainty, only sublimated and channeled.”

With over 16 million members, Second Life is the largest user created, 3-D online game world that features everything from malls to vampire castles, plus all the amenities of a faux-universe to play out your fantasies. It’s no surprise then that the sex market is strong and hi-tech hookers are cashing in—well, kind of.  Sex is cheap! And nowhere is it cheaper than Second Life. For about the price of a drink, you can get your rocks off all night with a 20-something gal like “Palela Alderson.” 

Kristin Davis, a New York madam whose clients included Lov Gov Eliot Spitzer, weighs on what she thinks celebrities would be worth if they were to leave behind their careers as thespians and take up working as call girls. Find out her top ten picks for celebrity escorts after the jump.

At first, when we found out David Duchovny had checked himself into rehab for sex addiction, we were like, “Damn, that’s kind of hot.” But that was naive. After researching sexual addiction—earlier Susannah Breslin discussed how many think the affliction is a myth—we’re feeling some serious sympathy for his wife of eleven years, actress Tea Leoni. It seems that David’s not just acting sex-crazed on his Showtime series. But how can sex, a natural bodily function, become a disease making headlines? The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity has defined sexual addiction as “engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self and others.” Just like drugs and alcohol, some people feel they’re abusing sex and themselves to get a high. But as Breslin points out, even doctors can’t decide if sexual addiction is a real condition or merely a symptom of a larger problem that goes beyond sex. Either way, it’s reeking havoc and wrecking homes. So how can you tell if your man is a slave to his wee man?  Seven signs, after the jump…

I like to think that I’m reasonably independent. I’m a modern woman, following in the charming footsteps of Mary Tyler Moore (I even have a little beret, but I don’t throw it up in the air, because I’m afraid I’d lose it). I like my work tremendously. As a result, I’m inclined to regard myself as fairly different from Melissa Beech, who recently wrote on The Daily Beast about her sugar daddy who “pays for a killer wardrobe,” as well as her apartment, and about $5,000 worth of expenses per month. As readers decried her for being “a prostitute,” “selfish,” and “classless,” I congratulated myself on working for a living and not having to rely on an older man to cover all my expenses.

This week, the female blogosphere is abuzz with chatter over a story by a college senior in Philadelphia entitled “My Sugar Daddy.” According to “Melissa Beech,” the pseudonymous author, she’s your average, upper-middle class girl: “I was blessed to have been raised with class, sent to the best schools, and taught to be well read, well spoken and well traveled.” During college, she worked in retail and as a waitress, but she spent more than she earned and the economy was tanking. When she set out to find a “real” job, she encountered a man who made her a different kind of offer: a “Mutually Beneficial Arrangement.” In a nutshell, he forks over around $5,000 a month, they travel together, he takes her to fancy hotels, and they have sex. He was already looking for such a relationship as a member of SeekingArrangement.com. Beech believes what she’s doing isn’t prostitution: “women have used their wiles and charms to get ahead for years.” So what do you think? Is she a smart girl working a recession to her advantage—or a call girl in denial?

This Friday, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call girl whose hotel trist with then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer led to the sex scandal of the year, will appear on ABC’s “20/20” for a sit-down interview with Diane Sawyer. If Spitzergate went down six months ago, why is Dupre talking now? Last week, the state of New York declared it wouldn’t be pressing charges against the Love Gov, meaning it’s unlikely Dupre will be charged for her part in the scandal, which frees the former escort to make her case to the public. On the same day, a lengthy profile of Dupre will appear in People. In excerpts from the interviews posted online, it sounds like the 23-year-old is looking to make apologies and mend her ways.

So, yesterday was a historic amazing day, with the first African-American winning the Presidency of the United States. It was also a bit of letdown, as it became clear that much of America still doesn’t like the idea of gay people getting married. But there was more good news! Three anti-choice measures failed! Amendment 48 in Colorado, which would have granted fertilized eggs fill rights, was rejected by 73% of voters; Measure 11 in South Dakota, which would have banned abortion save a very vague medical exception, was defeated; and Proposition 4 in California, which would have required parental notification, also didn’t pass.

On another note, Proposition K, which would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco, lost by 16 percentage points. [WOW and Feministing]

While picking the next President is on everyone’s mind, what’s going on in bedrooms is on the ballot too! Many states across the country have sex-related bills all vying for votes, as Elizabeth from “Sex in the Public Square” pointed out. So, here’s what’s going down in the voting booth, after the jump…