Facebook: The New Face of the World's Oldest Profession

Crankyjewishguy (CJG) often blogs about news stories he's read that involve professors and academics and the interesting, but often, shall we say, dubious research they pursue, but CJG really isn't sure what to make of this story. According to MSNBC.com, a Columbia University professor named Sudhir Venkatesh, whom CJG presumes is not Jewish, "spent a year gaining the trust of and tracking 290 prostitutes in New York to study the 'contrasts between old-world prostitutes and new-age sex workers.'" Wow, and they pay him for that?

CJG thought that by "old-world" it meant he was doing a historical comparison between, say, the Spanish prostitutes of Columbus's time and those of modern times, but that's apparently not the case. What he's studying is those who solicit business the old-fashioned way, by standing on dark corners in short skirts and low-cut tops and looking extremely available, for example, and those who are using Facebook, Craigslist and other new media to grow their business so to speak. In fact, according to Professor Venkatesh, 83% of the prostitutes he surveyed have a Facebook page which means CJG is going to be going back to his list of Facebook friends this afternoon and scrutinizing it very closely.

The new face of the world's oldest profession.

According to the good professor, in this day and age "no self-respecting cosmopolitan man looking for an evening of companionship is going to lean out his car window and call out to a woman at a traffic light." Right. If he's "self-respecting" he's going to troll the sex ads on Craigslist from the comfort of his own den while his wife and kids are upstairs sleeping. And the rise of new technology, says the professor, has made the trade "less risky and more lucrative," so much so that it has attracted "some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income." Whoa! Good thing this guy doesn't work for H&R Block! CJG is pretty sure that the Internal Revenue Code does not exempt income earned from illegal activity from taxation (in fact, he just looked it up and he's right), though he's equally sure few actually declare it on their returns. Sorry, professor, tax free income is what you get from municipal bonds and certain mutual funds, not from turning tricks. Better stick to your field of expertise.

This is how today's discerning, cosmopolitan man arranges to pay for sex.

Crankyjewishguy Marks One Month in the Blogosphere!

Today, crankyjewishguy (CJG) marks one month in the blogosphere which means he's been blogging almost as long as a certain politician served as governor of Alaska. What you may not know is that the technology that allows you to blog also allows you to see where visitors to your blog are coming from. No, CJG can't tell you exactly how may times his friend Ann Marie has been to his site, or even that Ann Marie has been to his site (except she said she was), but he can tell you, by country, who has been reading CJG and how people are finding him.

By far, most visitors are from the United States. No surprise there. Next are Canada, Singapore, the U.K. and Croatia. Let's hear it for Croatia! But the occasional visitor has also shown up from The Netherlands, Israel, Germany, France, Russia and even Cambodia. They love Jewish jokes in Cambodia.

And by far the biggest source of "traffic," as they say in the blogging biz, is Facebook which, as you surely know, was inspired by a movie called The Social Network.

But all of this begs the question: how many people are actually reading CJG? According to the data, CJG has had approximately 1,450 page views, not counting his own in the first month. If you count his own, the total goes up to 6,461,877,931,831 as you can see from this electronic tabulator in Times Square.

Now, 1,450 may sound OK for being just a month out of the gate, but CJG suspects that when you factor in repeat visitors all of his labors are actually entertaining an audience of dozens, most of them people he knows. But CJG is not deterred. He's going to keep at it until he can safely say there isn't a man, woman or child on Earth who hasn't heard of CJG, or until all this snow melts. It's gonna be close.