Why Silicon Valley’s Tech Boom Hasn’t Led To A Sex Boom

During the last tech boom, the sex industry rode on top of the piles of cash pouring into and of the Valley. That's not happening during the current tech bubble.

Madame Katorga* became a full-time dominatrix in the San Francisco area after cashing out as a dot-com executive at a startup during the first tech boom in the late ‘90s. A “high end” bondage practitioner, Kartorga’s clients at her East Bay dungeon come heavily from the tech world — older, “investor” types.

With moneyed male workers currently flooding Silicon Valley and San Francisco, one might think that Katorga’s business would be booming. But no. Thanks to the unusually tight-knit, helpful community of sex workers around the Bay Area, Katorga frequently talks to people all over the spectrum of bondage and escort — and they all say the same thing. Even though the Bay Area is the center of another global tech boom, no one feels very bubbly.

“A lot of what I glean from my lady friends is that they are not feeling busier in a big way,” Katorga said. “The average clients are less stressed, but when another Euro crisis hits, people are afraid to spend again.”

Madame Katorga's dungeon

Source: madame-katorga

San Francisco has been a town of booms and busts since the Gold Rush, an era that established Baghdad-by-the-Bay as a vice palace. “Nearly all these women at home were streetwalkers of the cheapest sort, but out here, for only a few minutes, they ask a hundred times as much as they were used to getting in Paris,” said one observer. In the ‘70s, S.F. was the porn industry: It was one of the few places were smut could be legally shown and distributed. According to scholars and industry workers, the first tech boom (as well as the years following the bust), were very kind to sex workers of all stripes, from web video pioneers to strippers.

But recent interviews with a number of sex workers in SF indicate that while the tech industry might have come back strong, libertine excess and Veuve in the champagne room didn’t come back with it: The sex bubble went flat a while back and hasn’t yet rediscovered its mojo. Technology has disrupted porn to the point of unprofitability; current tech culture looks down on strip clubs; even upper-echelon dungeon masters like Madame Katorga haven’t been able to boost their prices. It has been a decade, she said, since her rates went up.

What is it about the social web culture that makes sex less sexxxy? Experts say piracy, the rise of amateur porn and the availability of free online networking are all leading factors, but things seem to go deeper than that. The current wave of start-up entrepreneurs seems personally less interested in pushing social mores: sex used to drive commercial online innovation, but that’s not true any more. And skittish new tech workers, scarred by the economic collapses of the past few years, are not spending big, at least anecdotally, on sex.

According to Melinda Chateauvert, a professor at University of Maryland who is writing a book about the history of sex work in America, the relationship between sex and tech has never been static — and current data demonstrates the disrupting power (ugh) of the internet. Typically, she said that in a bad economy, more women — who comprise the bulk of sex workers — go into the sex industry. In the past, it has been seen as a way to make good money quickly. “That was true in the 1930s, even in the recession of the 1950s, which people tend to forget,” she said. In the 2008 dip, though, she said that was not the case, perhaps because men were actually harder hit than women. Katorga’s experience confirms this: “People used to think that when the economy gets weak, this is a good business to get into. I don’t think that’s true any more.” Start-up costs are too high and there is too much competition from free services.

Another commonly held notion is that in a good economy, high-end goods always rise: “When there is money around, people spend money on luxury services and that is as true for hookers as dog walkers,” said Chateauvert.

But even at the high end, workers say that the current marketplace is only a little better than the previous few years —an uptick, not a wave. One key reason is that costs have risen disproportionately compared fees, for new spaces especially. “New spaces have quite a high overhead,” Katorga explained, noting that the expense of setting up a dungeon can run to $20,000. This is a problem because unlike the “Wild West” of the first tech boom, Katorga said that neither she nor her peers have been able to raise their kink rates for the last decade. “The economy is kind of a bludgeon on both sides — because guys are always hopeful that prices will go down,” she said.


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