Venkatesh makes some misleading statements in “Skinflint.” First of all, he claims to identify three “tiers” of indoor sex work and asserts that the lowest-tier workers earn between $2000 and $5000 per session. "I found this world by accident in 1999," he writes, "when I started interviewing sex workers in Hell's Kitchen, Spanish Harlem, and other New York neighborhoods that were points of entry for newly arrived immigrants."

Having known many sex workers and having followed the issue as a feminist and as an academic since the early 1990s, I find it hard to believe that workers in these neighborhoods can obtain $2000 per session, particularly when they are conducting business in “apartments, public-housing projects, strip clubs, bars, and brothels.” In the “Erotic Services” section on Craigslist, many advertisers offer off-street trysts for far less than $2000, and most indoor workers I know charge between $250 and $300 per hour. Venkatesh’s figure might represent higher-end escort agencies, but he presents his data as if it applied to all off-street workers. The large discrepancy between fact and fancy makes me question his familiarity with the topic.

Secondly, Venkatesh claims that indoor workers are beaten by their clients twice a year on average. This statistic conflicts with the majority of studies. In a review of recent scholarly work on prostitution, the sociologist Ronald Weitzer cites British and Canadian studies indicating that only 1 to 14 percent of indoor workers have ever been assaulted. Researchers in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand have also found that indoor workers have low rates of abuse compared to streetwalkers (See “New directions in research on prostitution” in Crime, Law & Social Change, 2005, 43: 216). I’ve heard of criminals posing as clients in order to rob and rape sex workers, but among the workers I know, one person has been threatened at knifepoint by a stranger, and no one has ever been attacked by a regular client. Sex workers sometimes trade lists of “dirty tricks,” including information about men who assault sex workers, but it is an exaggeration to say that each worker suffers roughly two attacks per year.

Thirdly, Venkatesh writes, “approximately 40 percent of trades in New York's sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing.” Perhaps this is true within a certain rarified sub-sector of prostitution, but I doubt this statistic applies to the entire sex economy. Among the many sex workers I’ve spoken with and known as friends, prostitution overwhelmingly involves hand jobs or oral, vaginal or anal penetration.

Lastly, I want to comment on Venkatesh’s point about indoor sex workers becoming more careerist and more “therapeutically” oriented. This is true, but Elizabeth Bernstein (who, like Venkatesh, teaches sociology at Columbia University), advances this argument with far greater subtlety in her book Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex. Interpreting recent trends in light of economic and cultural developments of the last 30 years, Bernstein discusses the shift toward indoor work that Venkatesh mentions, but she examines more thoroughly and astutely what the professionalization of sex work has meant for both workers and clients. Audacia Ray, editor of $pread Magazine and a former sex worker herself, has also written insightfully about off-street prostitution in her recent book, Naked on the Internet. Slate would do well to consider these contributions if they intend to cover this issue in the future. As Spitzer's snafu indicates, one never knows when the need may arise.

To his credit, Venkatesh avoids obvious signs of anti-sex-worker bigotry and the gross distortions of fact that anti-prostitution advocates like Melissa Farley disseminate. I was nonetheless annoyed by his dubious statistics and overgeneralizations. At the very least, Venkatesh needs to qualify his data lest he spread new myths that might hurt sex workers.

Lisa Montanarelli

New York City