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Enough sugar-coating for political correctness, it’s time for some hard truth. Read carefully Berk and then roll your eyes and ignore me. I know what I’m talking about, and so do most of the members here, which is why I’m getting tired of listening to this immature, inexperienced, sexist, racist, arrogance on your part.
What we’re dealing with here is a guy who doesn’t know anything about the business, other than his own particular end-user experiences, his own personal psychological demons, and his political, sexual, and racial prejudices. And the irony of him showing his ass while unwittingly displaying how little regard he has for these people while purporting to be their champion has been commented on many times here, but I’m going to lay it out because he still doesn’t know why he’s making a fool of himself. And why his criticism of “our†arrogance and thoughtlessness is absurd and now too laughable to stomach quietly.
The “Up to You†is a standard and long-standing business practice by the girls (not saying there’s anything underhanded or wrong with it, just laying that out as a fact). There are generally two categories of girls who use it, 1) the more intelligent, confident, and cagey ones, and 2) the less experienced ones who have been taught to fall back on it when they have trouble reading a mark. I’ve talked about it countless times with my girls and friends in the business (owners and girls). These aren't just my opinions, they are theirs.
They’re not being devious really in employing the strategy, they’re relying on what they know about their customers; that we are uncomfortable with the situation, we are usually generous, we have perceptions about their financial state versus ours and the difficulty of the lives they lead, we are overly focused on impressing them as being good guys, and most importantly their disinterest in focusing on money plays into our need to have the union be as little about the money as possible and furthers our fantasy that she’s not really with us for the money, but to have fun and the money is secondary. It’s good business. It’s not weakness. She knows that her end will be greater if she doesn’t undersell you by overestimating your experience, and by relying on what she knows about us. If left up to you, you will pay more than what she would have settled for if she had to set the price in negotiations. She’s putting the burden on you, and you probably aren’t that experienced either in P4P or business to nail the market, or be confident enough to do so. Sure, they will occasionally get undercut, at which point she will speak up and put pressure on you to cough up more, or she will figure its close enough, cut you loose, and not pursue you again without correcting your market. But she’s in control. Not you. Like everything in this business, these girls are in control of everything they do, not you. You do what they dictate or gently lead you into doing. And you’re glad to do it.
You can genuinely not know any of this and still be an intelligent guy. You’re just not very experienced. No fault of yours. If we all knew all the tricks, they wouldn’t be good business. So I’m not saying you’re an idiot if you don’t know this. It’s just emblematic of the whole relationship between a girl and her customers. They are way ahead of where we think they are, and that’s part of the way they craft it. They know what they’re doing. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the way they are doing business. You just don’t know about their tradecraft.
This fundamental misunderstanding of the power relationship between a girl and customer is where your first fundamental flaw is evident Berk. You have said a hundred times in every characterization of this incident that he did this, he did that, he pulled this, this was a ploy in his part etc etc etc. You keep attributing the action, and the control to him. She was the one who put him in that position, and she did it intentionally and with forethought. She was guiding him into that position from the beginning and hoping to benefit from it financially on the back end. But the control was hers, not his.
The reason you don’t see that is your lack of experience, your misogyny, your racism, and your American arrogance. That’s why this post has been so infuriating to the members. The more experienced members have a perception of the girls that is incompatible with your view. They don’t see them as weak, stupid, pliable, and inexperienced like you do. Almost all of your characterizations put the action, control, and power on him, but portray her as weak, unintelligent, ineffectual, passive, powerless, and oppressed.
Your purported attempts to pick up the mantle of their cause of protect them assume that they need protection, would want your protection, and don’t understand, or have the ability to understand what they’re doing. You think little brown girls from other countries need protecting from big intelligent powerful white boys with more money than sense. Oh don’t get me wrong, I think you would recoil in horror at that characterization, or that suggestion. And I don’t even think you’d do it out of calculated damage control. I think you’d mean it. You genuinely do not see how racist, sexist, and culturally insensitive you are.
After you stop hyperventilating at the fact that you’ve just been exposed as a fraud and not a very nice person (or as you would characterize it, having your charges turned against you), your first response will be a snide remark. Your second will be disbelief and dismissal of what I’ve said. And your third (and only legitimate) comment will be “Even if everything you say is true, that doesn’t give him the right to stiff her with $80â€
That is a legitimate discussion, but a wholly separate one from what you’ve been engaging in lately. You’re wrong on that one too though (sorry-I’ve been looking for something to give you to be polite, but lately you’ve made that difficult). The strategy of her not pricing her services and him paying what he thinks is a legitimate business practice, and one implemented by her, not him. All the characterization of it otherwise is a misunderstanding of the roles, the practice, and it's purpose. Again, it's her, not him, making that decision. (As an aside: There's an extremely interesting conversation there about Asian women, particularly in HK, Tokyo, and Singapore, their passivity, and their social tactics in using that passivity to put the pressure on you and how they judge your every response to it in deciding how to treat you, but that's for another time. It is fascinating though.)
If ten guys go with girls for TLN (LT in more widespread vernacular), and they all pay $150, then good for them if they’re happy with the experience and think it’s worth it. Good for the girls. That’s fine, but there are also ten guys who go TLN with very happy girls for $80. I know a bunch of them. I’m not one. It’s not my thing. They’re happy, the girls are happy. So it’s none of your business. Unless again you want to don the cape and tights and fly around and tell us how stupid these girls are and how they can’t stick up for themselves and how they need the little boy running around in his Underoos playing Captain Save a Ho to protect them, the big rich powerful gringo that he is. (to borrow imagery from Spanky).
The girls aren’t mad at Ed, Berk. They laugh at guys like you. For the record, every point I’ve made here is one that a girl has made to me in the late-night kitchen-table laughing stories they tell about guys like you. It’s time to grow up. Every one of these girls knows you better than you know them. You aren’t the one in power, you aren’t in control, and you aren’t the smart enlightened one. With you’re attitude, you’re not doing anything to help these people. You’re being insensitive and insulting by lecturing everyone on how you think they need it. There are guys out there who have no respect for these girls. Unfortunately you’re one of them.
You constantly make derogatory comments about the girls, sometimes without even realizing it. It has consistently betrayed your true feelings for these girls, but more importantly it reveals your own self image.
When you decided to pretend to pick up the mantle once again, you actually titled this thread "Treating HOOKERS like you would want to be treated". Do you think they would chose the term "hookers" if they were picking how to be treated? Of all the available descriptions, would you?
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I don't blame the person who wanted the work done for $20. I simply inform them of my price structure and they can chose to accept my terms or not.
